Assignment: Simple Mechanics: Cuckoo Clock

Collaborators: sohyeong, michael_lee

In this lab we created a simple cuckoo clock mechanism. We used a variety of different building materials to create a little house and actuate the cuckoo with a mounted servo motor. Our cuckoo moves forward with a simple jointed linkage extended along a cardboard slot, while the door is opened from above by a string attached to the linkage and strung over a pulley. In addition, we created some short programs to make the cuckoo's motion dependant on a network event - in this case, it's someone pushing a button on a website, but we could imagine the cuckoo as a semi-ambient device triggered by website visits, e-Commerce sales, a new email, etc.

Components Used

• Foamcore
• Cardboard
• Multicolored electrical tape
• Plastic Erector pieces
• Lego Technics pieces
• Dental floss
• Dowels
• Beads
• Servo Motor
• Arduino Board
• Breadboard

Sketch

Images

Python Code for Network Monitoring

#
# TUI - Cuckoo Init
#

import time
import urllib
import serial

arduino = serial.Serial('COM11', 9600)
cuckooData = 'http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~mikaly/classes/tui/cuckoo/cuckoo.txt'

last_counter = urllib.urlopen(cuckooData).read()
while (True):
    counter = urllib.urlopen(cuckooData).read()
    change = int(counter) - int(last_counter)
    print "counter: %s, change: %s" % (counter, change)
    arduino.write(chr(ord(chr(change))))
    last_counter = counter
    time.sleep(20)