More Show and Tell

[Mooselake]

A small wall clock made with GM.  The gears are glued together so it's just decoratio n.

Does anybody know of a source for low speed, low power, low price motors that could be used to animate something like this?

Kirk

[tweakie]

That's great Kirk.

May be difficult to animate by 'self contained' battery power but it has got me thinking. 

Tweakie.

[dansfoundry]

Kirk, Try this for motor drives, http://www.micromark.com/Motorized-Planetary-Gearbox,8179.html  ain't cheap but is quality. I use them often to animate stuff.

[Mooselake]

Dan:  Thanks!  Never thought of Micromark - it's not the 7x16 minilathe I want, but it's an excuse to order something from them.  I dug some more with google (toy gear motors) and found some at http://www.solarbotics.com/motors_accessories/gear_motors/ .  Keep the micromark for myself, and use the solarboti cs ones for give-aways, maybe.  How noisy are the micromark motors?

Tweakie:  Will the result include a laser   You got me started looking at small lasers, like the 1 watters from Turkey - there's too much old farm equipment here that need gaskets made, and lasers would be a lot more fun than hammer-on-them gasket cutters.   My xacto knife skills aren't as good as they should be, although the last thing I need is yet another project.  Even laserless I'll be looking forwards to the result.

[Jim Mcmillan]

Looks nice Kirk.
This outfit has some little gearmotor s that might work:
http://www.pololu.com/
You might try a 110V synchrono us motor out of an old clock if you want smooth and quiet operation .
Jim

[dansfoundry]

Kirk, the gear motor from Micromark is fairly robust and is not as quiet as an asynchron ous motor. It is more suitable to power a large display. Dan

[Mooselake]

Thanks to all; many possibili ties.  The 90 degree gear motors look ideal, maybe with some extra gearing to slow them down a bit, tableboar d with slots to adjust center distances, maybe a magnetic friction clutch...

The controlle r and USB to servo stuff from Pololu is pretty fascinati ng - and cheap.  The stepper and servo controlle rs might work well with the stack of $4.30 microcont rollers I got from TI (like a gear mill angle adjuster), if only there was something left in the spare time bin.  Kid in a toy store syndrome<sigh>.

Seems like just yesterday that going to 1K bit ram chips was a big deal, 24" square boards for a whopping 64K bytes, don't slam the door or the loose pins are a bear to find.  Now the $1 microcont rollers way outdo our then jaw dropping performan ce communica tions minicompu ters, and gigabyte ram costs less than $10.  Moore's Law at work.