This orrery I built tracks each of the ancient planets: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. It is built around a programed Arduino on a custom printed circuit board. It caches nasa web data locally one a day and interpolates in between every couple seconds to aim the arrow at the celestial object. You can change objects by touching the symbol of the planet to track. The symbols are glass that I etched with laser engraving and mounted beneath a brass bezel that is capacitively scanned. It also is illuminated with addressable RGB lighting beneath for visual reaction to touch and activity. A single touch displays red and is ignored, if held it changes to blue and the orb will move to track the new object.
The initial vision was a sculpture that moved to slowly to notice but was always pointing towards something in the sky and thereby clearly moving throughout the day. I wanted the mechanisms to be full hidden and unexpected. Over time the form evolved and it is less subtle (LOL) then I was going for, but I like it! Funny store is that it became something of a “crystal ball” vibe that demanded I mount it into an appropriately intense antique round table that I simply was not prepared (capable?) of building so I started searching used furniture stores. Nothing was quite right, then I checked facebook marketplace and this funky old table for $20 was for sale down the road, and it was absolutely perfect!
Here are some of the final pictures:
And here are some of the build images:
Finally, here it is in action, showing its power-on calibration, acquisition and then controls.
