![]() ![]() I took a photo every six seconds using the intervalometer feature in the firmware enhancement Magic Lantern. So I used a Canon EOS M with manual focus and that worked better. I used a Canon PowerShot the first time but the automatic focus made the video jerky. I made a timelapse video of the display of one of the sundials I printed. Maybe he’s just too busy printing gnomons. The great mystery of Coyne’s contribution is that the sundial video was his first real post at his Mojoptix website, and there has not been another one since. Coyne sells his sundials on Etsy (it takes him 30 hours to print each one), but the primary impact of his work is the thousands of people who can print their own. The other patents from the 1990s have both lapsed (the owners stopped making fee payments) and might not have covered Coyne’s approach anyway. The video has been watched 426,000 times and the printing files have been downloaded 80,000 times from Thingiverse. In October, 2015 Coyne posted an elaborate and entertaining video about his sundial and also made the design files freely available. Only four of the six possible pixels are needed for this column of pixels. A cross section of Coyne's gnomon through one of the 16 slots that allow sunlight to form a column of "pixels" which make up the digits. This sundial is one of the more elegant examples of a complex problem that has waited decades to be solved by 3D printing.įigure 4. The resulting object would be difficult to manufacture with traditional methods, but would be quite simple to make with a 3D printer. ![]() ![]() Julien Coyne understood that a parametric CAD (computer aided design) program could create the intricate 3D model of the gnomon with a few lines of code repeated for each desired sun angle and for each “pixel” defining the projected digits. Tiny masks block the sunlight except when the angle is just right, and these masks must be aligned perfectly. The expense of the commercial digital sundial is due to the great precision required to manufacture it. This beautifully made digital sundial was developed in the 1990s and is sold by one of the developers - Daniel Scharstein of Middlebury College. As the sun moves, light from an entrance slit enters fiber optic strands which guide the light to the proper plexiglas segment of a digit.įigure 3. Steve Hines patented this digital sundial in 1988. I have always wanted one of these, but they cost $129.00, so I have been satisfied with an old fashioned gnomon stuck in the ground so it points at the north star and is surrounded by an arc of carefully placed rocks.įigure 2. One of these is still offered for sale as an indoor (e.g., window mounted) time display (Figure 3). These were simpler devices which directly blocked the sunlight except for the rays illuminating the digits in the time display. In the following decade other designs were developed and patented in 19. The first one was a fiber optic device developed in 1984 by Steve Hines and patented in 1988 (Figure 2). The gnomon has intricate pathways for sunlight to pass through when the sun angle is just right. As the sun moves across the sky, the digits representing 24-hour time are displayed in the shadow of the gnomon (the angled arm that traditional sundials have).įigure 1. ![]() Last year a clever guy named Julien Coyne posted his design for a digital sundial (Figure 1). ![]()
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