Design Process

At one point the idea of designing an entire time-keeping mechanism, display, and energy system from scratch was considered. This proved to be too ambitious to execute however, so existing displays and clocks were researched in order to start building a simple prototype.

Two calendar displays were considered when designing the display, the Clayton Boyer Celestial Mechanical Calendar and Orrery and the Clayton Boyer Perpetual Calendar. Both of these calendars are displays only. For both designs, a lever must be pushed manually in order to update the date.

Both of these calendar displays have similar functions. Both display the day of the week, the day of the month, the month, and the moonphase. The Celestial Mechanical Calendar displays a little bit more information than the Perpetual Calendar. This includes an indication of the current Zodiac Sun Sign, an Orrey showing the rotations of the three nearest planets, and an indication of the New Moon Ascension sign. Despite how technically impressive the Celestial Mechanical Calendar was, the Perpetual Calendar actually contained a more important aspect to it's design: it kept track of leap years. This was crucial to our overall design, since the Centennial Calendar must keep an accurate date over 100 years, which includes leap years. As an added bonus, the Perpetual Calendar was a more compact design, which adhered to the design requirments of our project. After analyzing both displays, the Clayton Boyer Perpetual Calendar was chosen as the display for our prototype.

Various clocks were researched for the time-keeping mechanism, and the most reasonably priced clock which still kept an accurate time was the Kundo All-Mechanical Torsional Pendulum Clock.