how can u connect a water wheel to an alarm clock?

Question

to make it turn on

Answer 1

Hmm.. assuming that you are using a digital clock,and that you want to use the clock to actuate the water wheel, here's what I'd do:

Open up the alarm clock and take the speaker off. Take the two wires- this will be your controlling signal, and hook a high valued capacitor(>100 uF) between the hot wire and ground. This will smooth out the beep! beep! beep! pulse train into a steady DC signal. Then let the alarm go off, and measure the voltage level with a voltmeter. Now, this signal is probably not going to be able to provide enough juice to run your motor that turns your wheel, so you will need to create a switching mechanism. The switching mechanism will consist of a battery,2 mosfets, an Nmos and a Pmos, and 1 resistor. But first you will need to use 2 resistors to make a voltage divider, so you can bump down the control signal voltage to the Threshold voltage level of the NMOS transistor. You hook the NMOS up in a common source configuration, with the control signal input going into the gate, the source connected to ground, and the resistor connected between the drain and the positive terminal of the battery. The drain of the nmos is your new output, which will go into the gate of the pmos. the source of the pmos will goto the positive terminal of the battery. The drain of the pmos will goto the positive lead of your DC motor, and the negative lead of the motor will goto ground. Now you will need to design the resistor so that when the nmos is on, the current that it pulls through the resistor will drop the nmos drain voltage(pmos gate voltage) at least below (Vbattery-Vthreshold of pmos) volts, so it will turn on. Then just hook the waterwheel to the motor.

The big advantage of this design is that when you want to turn off the waterwheel, just turn off the alarm.

Good luck!

Answer 2

You can use an electrical timer - $20 at hardware store. If you mean a wind up clock and a lever of some kind for the water wheel - you got some work ahead of you. Maybe a sound sensor (like the lights on-lights off clap machine) attached to a motor. It seems it would be on for 12 hours and off for 12 hours.

Answer 3

What do U want the water wheel to do - wind up the clock spring, wind up the alarm spring, set the time, set the alarm, turn on the alarm, turn off the alarm or throw it against the wall ?

Answer 4

Hey, stew, what's with double posting your Q? Is that necessary?