On the face of it, making a clock that displays the time by moving a pointer along a linear scale shouldn’t be too hard. After all, steppers and linear drives should do the job in a jiffy. Th… ...

Whereas a typical scale would then simply show the resulting number on an LCD display, [Mirko] decided to use a moving coil meter driven by the Arduino’s analog output.

It’s made of 6061 aluminum, steel hardware (screws, nuts, bearings), 3D printed gears, an Arduino Uno, and the hour and minute panels are laser cut / etched plywood.

“Building a Lower-power Linear Actuator with Arduino: quite a few people have asked me about scaling down openDog to make it lighter and cheaper, so I thought I’d discuss the options in this ...