DATOR 10 FLIP CLOCK

Solari Udine Dator 10 Flip Clock

The Solari Dator 10 is the queen of flip clocks. Mine came from its birth country in Italy, complete with Italian markings for the days and month. It's a very early model, as you can tell from the metal only parts (later models have some plastic gears), so mine is most probably a 1957 example. Mine is also a slave clock: it does not have a synchronous motor to drive the clock. Instead you have to drive it with 12V or 24V pulses of alternate polarity every minute. Below you'll find the restoration videos, the documentation I gathered, and the plans for pulse driver I made from an AVR Olimex board.

Video Series

Dator 10 Documentation

Solari Clock Pulser Circuit

This is the pulser circuit I made to drive the clock and that you can see in the restoration video, Part 4.  There are other pulsers available on the web, but I found them very annoying to use, as they don't have a convenient user interface, which makes adjusting the time a real misery. I built mine on a Olimex AVR-128 board, but you should be able to port the code to any ATmega based device that is attached to a standard LCD screen and a few buttons, such as an Arduino. The AVR pulses drive a pair of relays installed on a small daughter board, that in turn send 12V pulses to the clock with alternate polarity, every minute.

To build this, you'll need to upload the .hex code file below to the Olimex board. You also need to build a daughter board with two transistors and two relays to generate the alternating +12V and -12V pulses. I never made a PCB for that board, but I show the sketches I used to wire this circuit on a Jameco proto board.  If you ever make a clean PCB for the daughter board, let me know.