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WiFi-driven analog clock from a cheap movement
I set out to convert a cheap analog clock so it could be driven over WiFi, inspired by a couple of existing projects. My first attempt seemed broken because the second hand crawled around a degree at a time, so I eventually gave up on it and bought a second clock. Putting a battery in that one first revealed the real problem: the movement sweeps rather than ticks. I pulled the old clock's circuit back out of the trash, measured it on an oscilloscope, replicated the pulse pattern in firmware, and got it working.
Description
I saw that someone had converted a cheap analog clock to be driven by WiFi and immediately wanted one, based on ESP8266_WiFi_Analog_Clock, with some more info on another project at ventinari-clock.
When I tried to make it, I screwed something up: the second hand moved very, very slightly, with each tick covering about 1 degree instead of 6. After many, many long hours on the clock I gave up on it and figured I had ruined the motion, since it kept moving extremely slowly no matter what parameters I used.
So I went out and got another one. This time I figured I would put a battery in first, just to see what happened, and the thing swept. That was why the first clock was going so slowly: it was not built to tick at all.
I then dug the old clock's circuit out of the trash, measured it with an oscilloscope, replicated the pulse pattern in firmware, and it worked perfectly. I left it running overnight, but now it does not work, and I think something broke.