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3d printed sundial clock7/25/2023 ![]() ![]() All you’ll need are four 3D printed parts (ABS, he notes), as well as a jam jar and a few screws, nuts, and washers.Īs Julldozer describes, 3D printing proves to be essential in the project because the elaborate algorhythmically designed holes - the “swiss cheese”– can’t be made any other way like injection molding or another mass production method. The whole project is open source, and you can download everything on Thingiverse (or just buy it from his Etsy shop). Then he combined these number matrixes into an open-source 3D printable model with OpenSCAD script and STL files. He created a matrix for each number shown on the sundial. In a YouTube video (see below) that explains how Julldozer conceptualized and designed the project, he tells us he built the sundial algorhythmically using OpenSCAD. And I thought I had heard it all. It’s kind of like, why stop at approximating the correct time with a sundial when you can straight out just have the exact digital time displayed? Modern enough for you yet? Julldozer of Mojoptix set out to 3D print a sundial with the question: “What if we had a sundial that worked more like some sort of enormous digital watch?” And what he means by this is that as the style on the sundial moves, sun is either blocked or it breaks through the design holes (he calls it “swiss cheese”) so that the actual time can be read in the shadow of the sundial. Now, add 3D printing to make a digital sundial for the Southern hemisphere and that might get your attention, right? For the Southern hemisphere, the latitude has to be reversed from the Northern hemisphere’s latitude. Using just a few parts, the trick is to get the edge (style) of the part that throws the shadow (gnomon) to be parallel to the Earth’s rotation axis while staying accurate all year long. Sundials are rather simple instruments at first glance. It was Ancient Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy that gave us the first sundials, and since then they have been used as serious objects of mathematical study and as decorative objects because they represent technology of the past that was streamlined over time. “The swiss cheese inside the sundial is so intricate, that you can’t realistically use injection molding or some other mass-production method,” the inventor wrote in a blog post. 3D printing seems actually to be the only practical way to build this digital sundial.Do you remember the first time you grasped the concept of a sundial, the idea that we can tell general time from observing the shadow cast by the sun via an object designed for this purpose? It seemed like a pretty magical concept, and it also introduces basic concepts about math and astronomy in an interesting and beneficial way. It’s unlikely that the digital sundial will make its way into your local department store, though, and for now they’re available only through the inventor’s Etsy shop. It’s even adjustable for Daylight Saving Time. While traditionally sundials were used in ancient times to cast a line or triangular shadow to indicate the hour, this one is designed so that when light passes through it, it displays numbers that indicate the time. Basically, it’s magical.Ĭoyne explains that the shape of the sundial has been mathematically designed to only let through sun rays at exactly the right time and angle, allowing it to display the actual time with sunlit digits within the sundial’s shadow. French inventor Julien Coyne of Mojoptix has engineered a 3-D printed that numerically displays the time between 10 a.m.
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