What on Earth is a Geneva drive (or device, mechanism, wheel, it has many names) anyway? Glad you asked :) It’s nifty little thing that the Swiss watch makers in Geneva invented to improve their mechanical watches. Or as Wikipedia describes it:
The Geneva drive or Maltese cross is a gear mechanism that translates a continuous rotation into an intermittent rotary motion. The rotating drive wheel has a pin that reaches into a slot of the driven wheel advancing it by one step. The drive wheel also has a raised circular blocking disc that locks the driven wheel in position between steps.
Ace SolidWorks power user Deepak Gupta wrote an in-depth step-by-step tutorial a month ago on animating said model in SolidWorks. He based his tutorial on a Geneva device CAD model that GrabCAD user Bobby Dyer had uploaded. It’s all connected, you see. Now, who’s up to creating a real working model of this just to complete the circle? Or at least demo a mechanical watch that uses the movement?
