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Comment by Arjuna | Hacker News Reader

Original poster here. I thought you good people would find the Geneva drive interesting. It is so simple and elegant; similar in spirit to the elegance of a beautiful algorithm.

For further reading on the Geneva drive... don't miss the spherical Geneva drive design, illustrated in figure 9-3:

http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/k/kmoddl/pdf/002_010.pdf

Although not Geneva drive related, if you want to combine your passion of horology with human spaceflight, you will truly enjoy "John Glenn's Heuer":

http://www.onthedash.com/docs/Glenn.html

Also, thank you all for the great, related links!

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Reminds me of all the crazy gears they used in mechanical computers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4

What a fantastic video!

Wow that video is cool. I'd love to see some design tools and open cad files for 3d printed mechanical computers

To be honest, at first I saw this post and thought, "how is a simple post of the Geneva drive mechanism news?". But after reading some of the followup and various links, I've definitley changed my opinion. Some amazing mechanical engineering in here. Thanks for this great video!

Yes thank you, posts like this are what make HN good. It's not necessarily news or even related to technology but interesting for us hacker types nonetheless.

It certainly is technology, just not new technology. ;-)

Until you implement it at tiny scale using COTS integrated circuit technology or some semi-hypothetical individual atoms basis. MEMS chips are high tech.

Perhaps you could make a nano (well, micro) scale peristaltic pump out of a really small geneva linkage. Or gears for a little robot that floats in your bloodstream or something like that.

even then, the Geneva drive will still be old technology.

The story of tech is a wheel not a line. If you think the idea of a JVM is innovative, I've got a pascal P-system to sell you. Or tokenized basic.

Thanks! For a moment there I was like "what the hell is this." But then I found the article fascinating and then I remembered, this is what HN is all about.

This is great. Thank you for posting this. I am looking to build an interactive display with intermittent rotation of objects, and couldn't think of a way to accomplish this efficiently without resorting to a software solution. This definitely solves it much better!

I would love to see an animation of Fig. 9-20

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