by Meghna Sharma
Upon the user clicking the button, the clock sets forward by an hour - similar to a wind up timer. However, the user will randomly see time fly by from what should have been one click and one hour!
This project makes the sound from 12 folded tape inserts inside the cup that the thin, plastic spinning arm hits.
The colors of the piece were chosen to represent the schooling system. The typical colors of a school bus are what students start and end their timed school days with and I hope to evoke that anticipation/relief through this choice.
As a second semester senior reflecting on the past four years, and the twelve before, in my education, it’s hard for me to believe it’s already over! Honing in to this feeling of losing control of time left in school, I focused on the sound of a clock ticking.
We sit in high school and wait for the clock on the wall to signal class ending: freedom! Clocks should be dependable and reliable, yet we sometimes can’t believe how time flies, or rather slips through our fingers.
This piece, Slipping Time, reflects how I feel about clocks - time warpers!
Iteration 1
My original goal for this project was to ‘hack’ a clock and wind it in irregular patterns. The closer my piece looked to an actual clock, the more disturbing the interruption would seem. Maybe even dystopian!
It was very hard to get a hold of this without much advance planning, so I moved onto my next iteration in which I’d make my own clock.
Iteration 2
The next best sound to a clock to me is the ticking of a ‘Wheel of Fortune’ wheel. I imagined thin, flexible plastic that the wheel can still hit and make a noise with, but pass easily enough it doesn’t get stuck. I was going to use a motor to drive the clock arm with the pivot of rotation in the center and the interference via ticks on the outside of the circle. I attempted this with an empty cup of cottage cheese, using the bowl walls to create the ticks and fastening the motor to the middle of the cup base.
Final Iteration
Unfortunately, the cup walls were too comfortable in their orientation, and the cut out ticks I made would not stay in position. Even if they did, the TT motor torque (and the taped arm to the moto) was not strong enough to surpass one of these after me holding it in place.
I therefore just tried to get the motor and arm to work first, and realized I could use the same tape to create flexible, thin jut-outs that the frail motor arm could still pass!
Upon building the final iteration, my first focus was to fasten the motor and arm. I originally tried using a servo and then realied it does not spin a full 360 degrees - a crucial feature for a clock. I then switched to a TT motor and wired the H-bridge with help from a tutorial linked in this document’s Sources section.
However, the TT motor spins on both sides, so I had to create a hole in the bottom of the cup for the axle’s other end. I also created a hole on the side of the cup as an outlet for the motor’s wires to keep the main project surface clean!