Nigel Doyle created this very nice looking LEGO Ball Clock on his Youtube channel. It keeps time by rolling balls on tracks which display the minutes and hours. One problem, when using the LEGO battery box the power will drop over time which makes the time fall behind.
Our USB Power Box to the rescue! By using our USB Power Box, Nigel was able to keep a constant voltage which results in a very consistent time display. Great use case and very nice model. Keep up the great work Nigel!
Here is what he wrote himself in the description.
Here’s my latest creation, a rolling ball clock. All my own work and design but inspired by the Chronomeans Dunyazad rolling ball clock.
The clock is powered by a Powered Up motor controlled by a simple one block motor node on the Powered Up App running on an Android phone. To maintain a constant voltage I’m using a USB power supply from PV Productions in the Technic Hub. This is then plugged into a mains powered USB charging hub.
I’ve had to use steel ball bearings as Lego GBC balls aren’t heavy enough to trigger the release mechanisms. The green wire is 3.3mm line trimmer cord. The other non Lego elements are some nuts used as counter weights.
The clock is reasonably accurate losing or gaining about 10 – 15 seconds per hour. To adjust it’s just matter of changing the speed on the code block slightly.
12 o’clock is displayed by no balls. The motor spins at about 125 rpm, it then goes through 3 x 1:5 gear reductions to drive to the 2 big red axles. These rotate once per minute and therefore could be considered a second hand. There’s always 2 balls in motion so it takes 2 minutes for ball to move from the ball feeder to the top.
The reset mechanism resets the 3 release mechanisms every minute whether they need resetting or not.
The whole project has taken about 3 months from start to finish. I started with a few sketches then prototypes of the various mechanisms to test whether I could make it all work. There has been a massive amount of fine tuning and refinement to get to this point of a working model.
The clock is fairly reliable and can run for hours with no issues but like many GBC’s you can get the occasional ball doing what it’s not supposed to.
