Aeropic's magnetico-mechanical 7 segment display

thingiverse

This is my attempt to build a mechanical 7 segments display with the following requirements : - Only one motor to drive one digit - High visibility - Small enough - Nice looking segments with 45° angles at the tips - Cheap - Quiet but reproducing as far as possible a clicking noise like vintage flipdots displays - Able to self-detect its origin as the idea is to build a clock with four of them… see it working here : https://youtu.be/fM9fBpv1Tc0 The hackaday page: https://hackaday.com/2022/03/05/one-stepper-plus-a-whole-bunch-of-magnets-equals-a-unique-seven-segment-display/ The concept is then to get flipping black and white segments motorized only from magnetic fields. If you place a compass in front of a magnet it will rotate and align itself into the magnetic field. Rotate the magnet the compass will follow. Here the segments include a small magnet and geared wheels will successively present north/south poles of magnets in front of the segments’ magnets to rotate the segments. One wheel with 10 magnets is rotating in front of one segment. The 7 wheels are all geared and synchronized by the rotation a single cheap stepper motor. A hall sensor will detect the origin. An ESP32 is driving the stepper motor. That is !