Introduction

Since we visited Munich Germany in our first stuff mobility, we wanted to present back to Samos to our visitors something related to the German cultural heritage.

A cuckoo clock is, typically, a pendulum-regulated clock that strikes the hours with a sound like a common cuckoo's call and has an automated cuckoo bird that moves with each note. Some move their wings and open and close their beaks while leaning forwards, whereas others have only the bird's body leaning forward. The mechanism to produce the cuckoo call has been in use since the middle of the 18th century and has remained almost without variation. It is thought that much of its development and evolution was made in the Black Forest area in southwestern Germany (in the modern state of Baden-Württemberg), the region where the cuckoo clock was popularized (source Wikipedia).

Materials

Our schools had a kit of the Gigo S4A PROGRAMMING BLOCKS #1204 and we used it to build and program the Cuckoo clock.

Video of our Clock in operation

Photos

In the heart of the Gigo Maker Control Box lies an Arduino Leonardo microcontroller that was programmed via USB cable with the S4A 1.6 , a Scratch modification (block programming) for easy programming of the Arduino open source hardware platform.

Software: http://s4a.cat/

The design, uses an Infrared distance sensor to sense if someone is standing in front of the clock in a nearby distance and then it triggers. When triggered, a large 360° servo motor is opening the 2 doors with a belt mechanism and a smaller 180° servo motor is driving the cuckoo bird outside with some gears.

Code

File: 

https://github.com/vbarekos/erasmus19/tree/master/Gigo-CuckooClock

(requires software S4A)