阅读说明：本技术 用于制表的指示器装置 (Indicator device for making watch ) 是由 卢西亚诺·萨索 于 2020-03-25 设计创作，主要内容包括：本发明涉及一种用于制表的指示器装置(D),其中驱动齿轮(3)使从动程序轮(2)旋转,该从动程序轮基本上构造为具有外齿(20)和内齿(21)的圆冠。后者与偏心内齿轮(1)啮合,其摆线旋转运动具有合适的传动比,从而可以显示程序轮(2)上给出的信息。该装置适用于制作时钟万年历。(The invention relates to an indicator device (D) for a watch, wherein a drive gear (3) rotates a driven program wheel (2) which is essentially designed as a circular crown with external teeth (20) and internal teeth (21). The latter is engaged with an eccentric internal gear (1), the cycloidal rotary motion of which has a suitable transmission ratio, so that the information given on the program wheel (2) can be displayed. The device is suitable for making perpetual clock calendars.)

1. Indicator device (D) for watchmaking, comprising a toothed driving wheel (3), a driven wheel (2) connected to the driving wheel (3), characterised in that the program wheel (2) is substantially configured as a circular crown comprising external teeth (20) and internal teeth (21), and that the device further comprises an internal gear wheel (1) cycloidally engaged with the internal teeth (21) of the program wheel (2), so that the information shown on the wheel (2) is correlated with the position of the internal wheel (1).

2. The device according to claim 1, wherein the inner gear (1) is eccentric with respect to the wheel (2).

3. Device according to claim 2, wherein the eccentricity (e) of the annulus gear (1) is directed along a straight line (Y) connecting the centre of rotation (O, O') of the drive wheel (3) and the program wheel (2).

4. The device according to any one of the preceding claims, wherein the annulus gear (1) comprises a plurality of teeth (1a-1f) arranged in predetermined circumferential points as a function of information relating to the program wheel (2) to be indicated.

5. Device according to any one of the preceding claims, wherein the wheel (2) comprises a band of upper teeth (4, 5, 6) movable between a forward position, in which they are aligned with respect to the teeth of the external teeth (20) of the program wheel (2), and a backward position, in which they are retracted with respect to the external teeth (20).

6. Device according to claim 5, wherein said movable teeth (4, 5, 6) are associated with elastic contrast means for returning to the retracted or advanced state.

7. Device according to any one of the preceding claims, wherein the driving wheel (3) comprises a plurality of teeth (10-15), said teeth (10-15) having a reduced extension in the longitudinal direction or in any case over a portion of the thickness of the wheel (3) itself, and at least one complete tooth (9) extending over the thickness of the tooth (9) of the driving wheel (3), wherein the teeth (10-15) having a reduced extension mesh with the wheel (2) under predetermined conditions.

8. Device according to any of the previous claims, comprising a planetary gear (7), said planetary gear (7) being in mesh with a sun or pinion (8) and coaxial with the axis of rotation of the inner wheel (1).

9. Device according to claim 8, wherein the planetary gear (7) is adapted to act at a band of upper teeth (4, 5, 6) of the wheel (2) to move the upper teeth (4, 5, 6) between a forward position, in which they are aligned with respect to the teeth of the external toothing (20) of the wheel (2), and a backward position, in which they are retracted with respect to the external toothing (20).

10. Device according to any one of the preceding claims, wherein the outer toothing (20) of the wheel (2) has 31 teeth, while the drive wheel (3) is adapted to turn one turn in 24 hours.

11. Device according to claim 10, wherein the driving wheel (3) has a 24-tooth profile limited to a circumferential sector, but not necessarily 24-tooth teeth.

12. A timepiece comprising a perpetual calendar, in which there is at least one device according to any one of the preceding claims.

Technical Field

The invention relates in its more general aspect to the control of mechanical members (members), such as components (components) of mechanisms (mechanisms) particularly for watchmaking applications.

Background

It should be pointed out from the outset that the invention is generally applicable to the production of watches, both for portable watches, watches or pocket watches, and for table clocks, wall clocks or any other application, since the size or shape of the watch/clock is not relevant.

Furthermore, although the invention relates to the control of mechanical components, it should not be considered to be limited to a completely mechanical timepiece, i.e. a timepiece having a manual or automatic spring type, but can also be extended to a timepiece having mechanical components controlled by a quartz or other system.

Therefore, when referring to the form of a generic tab or clock in this description and in the following claims, this should not be understood in a limiting manner, and what will be described can also be extended to other embodiments of the clock, which differ in size, use, drive.

It is known that in watches, table clocks or wall clocks, in addition to the hands, there are several members which are activated periodically to provide an indication to the user.

For example, date stamps (dates), calendars, constellation zodiac, and indicators of other functions, such as clock load level, time zone, time counter, etc.

These indicators are usually composed of a mechanism driven by a gear train connected to a gear train that rotates the escapement.

An important aspect relating to these indicators and the associated watch-making mechanisms is that, depending on their function, they must have the possibility of providing variable indications, i.e. they are a combination of cycles with different periodicities.

Typical is the number of days per month of the calendar, some 31, some 30, some 28, and then even 29 in leap years.

In some mechanical spring clocks, particularly in desk or wall clocks, there is also an indicator of the load level, i.e. a system that signals the remaining amount before the spring load is exhausted, to prevent the clock from stopping, alerting the user that the spring must be triggered.

Obviously, as the number of functions increases, so does the difficulty to overcome, since it requires the driving of the whole series of mechanical members, such as ratchets, lever transmissions, cams, etc., which not only require a certain amount of energy to operate (and therefore subtract from the energy used to drive the hour and minute hands), but also require lubrication to reduce friction and wear.

Furthermore, increasing the complexity and/or number of mechanisms inevitably increases the size of the timepiece, as well as its assembly and production costs.

For this reason, perpetual mechanisms, also known as program wheels, have been developed in the past, including gear trains and gears that reduce or eliminate the presence of cam mechanisms, ratchets and springs, but suffer from the drawbacks described above.

An example of such a mechanism is described in european patent application EP 1351104.

It is a mechanism consisting of a series of planetary gear trains in which a toothed program wheel with a predetermined number of teeth (in this case 24, corresponding to hours of the day) controls the gears of a cascade drive, some of which are of the planetary type.

One or more of these gears are associated with hands and/or concentric discs or rings, the latter with indications (names and/or numbers) of the date, month and year; in effect, the gear train changes the position of the concentric discs so as to radially align the indication of each disc with a given day, month, year, so that the radially extending clock hands can provide the corresponding summary information.

Although this solution with a program wheel is effective in providing an accurate and reliable perpetual calendar, it does not seem optimal in terms of simplifying the mechanism and reducing its size.

In fact, the use of gear trains inevitably requires a certain functional rigidity of the system, since they are components with fixed transmission ratios, and therefore a respective gear train must be provided for each required calendar information.

In addition, in order to display information, it is necessary to have a dial with a pointer to read the indication; increasing the number of parts reduces the immediacy of reading the calendar, since the movement of the concentric discs of the dial still gives a summary representation of the information which is not always accurate.

In other words, since the hands must simultaneously act as indicators of the days of the week and of the month, of the month and of the year, which are radially aligned on the dial, the position of this information varies over time, so their alignment and the resulting readings are inevitably affected by configurations that are not entirely precise.

Disclosure of Invention

In view of this situation, it is therefore a technical problem of the present invention to make a mechanical device for the programming of wheeled watches, whose structural and operational characteristics allow to overcome the above-mentioned limitations associated with the considered technical conditions.

In other words, the object of the present invention is to simplify, at least in part, the program wheel mechanism known from EP1351104, so as to allow the reduction of its constituent parts and thus facilitate the production of perpetual calendars comprising this mechanism.

The idea of solving this technical problem consists in using at least one cycloidal satellite gear capable of driving the motion deceleration with a predetermined transmission ratio and preferably driving a contextual indication of information, such as one of the pieces of information of a perpetual calendar, for example the days of the week and month, or the month, year, etc.

The features of the invention are set forth with particularity in the claims appended to this specification.

Drawings

These characteristics, the following results and the effects achieved by the present invention will become clearer from the description of a preferred and non-exclusive embodiment given below, illustrated by way of non-limiting example in the accompanying drawings, wherein:

figure 1 shows a perspective view of a mechanical device according to the invention;

figures 2 and 3 show rear views of the previous device in respective operating conditions;

FIG. 4 shows a front view of the device of the previous figures;

figure 5 shows a detail of the device of the previous figures.

Detailed Description

With reference to the figures listed above, which show a perpetual calendar mechanism with a program wheel according to the invention, designated as a whole by the reference numeral D.

In particular, as can be appreciated, for the sake of simplicity and clarity, the figures only show the elements that are necessary or in any case helpful for understanding the invention; as regards the mechanism and the rest of the timepiece to be mounted, reference may be made to what is generally known in the art, including what explained in the above-mentioned publication EP 1351104.

Therefore, those skilled in the art can implement the present invention on the basis of the contents to be explained later and may also utilize information belonging to their common technical knowledge.

From a general point of view, it can be said that the operation of the mechanical device D for the tabulation is based on the cycloidal motion of the eccentric gear 1, thanks to which the device D can perform the typical function of a perpetual calendar, i.e. taking into account the different lengths of the months of the year (28, 30 and 31 days) and the difference in the length of the month of february in leap years (29 days).

Device D allows direct viewing of the information of the component itself; for example, fig. 4 shows day 2 month and day 28 in leap year; in particular, the number of days (28) is shown on a vertical line connecting the centres of rotation of the two gears or wheels 2 and 3 (see figure 4).

On the other hand, the name of the month is the name at the point or indicator reference 23 located below the number 1 (february in this example), whereas the indication of leap years is visible in the window 24, where the letter L stands for "leap years" (obviously, depending on the language, habits, clock size and other factors, other symbols and/or letters can be used to provide the indication in the most appropriate way).

As said, the device or clockwork D comprises a driven wheel or gear 2 and a motor wheel or gear 3, meshing with each other, the former of which contributes to the execution of the program wheel function, and the second of which receives a movement or driving torque from a timepiece escapement, known per se and not shown in the drawings.

The programmable system consists of gears 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

In particular, the motor gear 3 is a 24-tooth gear, of which only 7 teeth are shown in the figure for the sake of simplicity, which rotates one revolution per day (i.e. 24 hours).

The wheel 2 is in fact a circular crown, equipped with external 20 and internal 21 teeth; according to the preferred embodiment shown in the figures, the external toothing 20 has 31 teeth (similar to the days of a month) and the internal toothing 21 has 26 teeth.

As will be better seen hereinafter, the external teeth 20 mesh with the driving wheel 3, while the internal teeth 21 mesh with the internal wheel 1, the internal wheel 1 having a rotation axis fixed and eccentric with respect to the rotation axis of the wheel 2, the eccentricity "2 e" rotating along the line Y connecting the rotation axes of the wheels 2 and 3.

The eccentric 1 has hypocycloidal rotary motion with respect to the internal teeth 21 of the crown of the wheel 2 and, according to a preferred embodiment, it is obtained from a 24-tooth gear, 18 of which are removed and only 6 are left, as shown in the figures by 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 1e, 1 f.

These teeth 1a-1f mesh with the internal teeth 21 (with 26 teeth) of the wheel 2; in this transmission ratio, on each circumference of wheel 2, eccentric gear 1 advances by two teeth with respect to it.

The external toothing 20 of the wheel 2 has 31 full teeth of lower order (representing the days of the month) and three oscillating teeth of higher order, indicated by the numerical references 4, 5 and 6, arranged on the upper surface of the wheel 2.

The gear train thus formed is driven by a driving wheel 3 (in turn connected to a time gear train not shown in the figures, from which it moves), which is designed with 24 teeth (but not necessarily 24 teeth), of which there are only seven successive teeth 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and which rotates a full circle within 24 hours. Of the seven teeth 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, only the central tooth 9 is full, i.e. its thickness is equal to the belt thickness of the toothed wheel 3, while the other teeth 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 extend only half or in any case over a part of the thickness of the toothed wheel itself.

Furthermore, as can be seen, the tooth 9 is in a central position with respect to the other teeth and it precedes the teeth 10, 11, 12 in the direction of rotation of the drive wheel 3 (indicated by the arrows in the figures) while it follows the remaining teeth 13, 14, 15.

The teeth 10-12 and 13-15 are located on the same horizontal plane as the oscillating teeth 4, 5 and 6 on the wheel. The last three teeth guided on wheel 2 mesh with teeth 9-12 of driving wheel 3 only when they are pushed outwards, in the example shown, normally being returned to the backward position by elastic contrast means (not shown here).

These elastic means consist, in the example shown, of springs 17, housed respectively in the teeth 4, 5, 6 and projecting radially at the internal teeth 21 of the wheel 2.

These teeth, along with their guide system, may be designed differently to eliminate the use of springs. The configuration explained so far is selected to show for convenience of description.

The perpetual calendar device D also comprises eight-tooth planetary gears 7, of which only three are complete, i.e. have a complete involute profile, which rotate on the eccentric 1 pivot; the planet gear 7 meshes with a ten-tooth sun gear or pinion 8, coaxial with the eccentric axis of rotation of the hypocycloid wheel 1.

The operation of the perpetual calendar device D according to the invention proceeds as follows.

Once a day, after the driving wheel 3 has completed one cycle, the tooth 9 engages with the wheel 2, advancing it by one tooth, which corresponds to 1 day of calendar advancement.

In doing so, the wheel 2 rotates one revolution around the maximum length of the month in 31 days.

However, when the device must represent one of the months of the year having a length of 30 days (for example april, june, september or november), wheel 2 must be able to advance by two teeth (i.e. two days) when the teeth of driving wheel 3 pass: i.e. from the tooth representing day 30 must go directly to the tooth representing day 1.

In the perpetual calendar device D according to the invention, this is possible thanks to the cycloidal motion of the eccentric 1, which allows one of its six teeth (meshing with the internal teeth 21 of the program wheel 2) to push outwards the first oscillating tooth 4 encountered by the latter in the direction of rotation of the wheel 2 (clockwise in fig. 3 and 4).

In doing so, the oscillating tooth 4 meshes with the tooth 10 of the central entity 9 adjacent to the driving wheel 3, advancing the driven wheel 2 by two teeth, driving the passage from tooth 30 to tooth 1, this occurs four times a year, precisely in april, june, september and november.

One special case is february (fig. 3), where a transition from tooth (day 28) to tooth (day 1) is to be made, thus 4 teeth are to be advanced. This is possible due to the combination of the cycloidal motion of the wheel 1 and the motion of the satellite gear wheel 7.

Satellite gear 7 actually has eight teeth, of which only three (denoted 71, 72, 73) are full and have the numbers 1, 2 and 3, respectively, corresponding to the next or non-leap years (i.e. 365 days), of which the month of february is 28 days; the teeth 71, 72, 73 are used to push the third tooth 6 of the movable teeth outwards into engagement with the drive wheel 3.

Once a year, two adjacent teeth of the eccentric 1 engage at the teeth 4 and 5 of the program wheel 2, pushing them outwards.

In this case, at the same time, the whole tooth of the satellite wheel 7 pushes the oscillating tooth 6 outwards.

In doing so, the whole tooth 9 of wheel 3 pushes wheel 2 from tooth 28 (corresponding to the respective date) to tooth 29 (day), while teeth 6, 5 and 4 mesh respectively with teeth 10, 11 and 12, advancing driven wheel 2 three positions. Thereby achieving a total displacement of 4 teeth (i.e., days) from 2 months and 28 days to 3 months and 1 day.

When the year is a Leap year, on day 2 month 29, satellite wheel 7 shows tooth L (abbreviation for Leap year Leap), which without its tip would not push tooth 6 outwards. In doing so, drive wheel 3 advances wheel 2 by only three teeth, corresponding to a shift from 2 months 29 to 3 months 1.

It should be noted that for this purpose, unlike the other two teeth 4 and 5, the movable tooth 6 is preferably made on a lever arm 6a acting as a cam, so as to be able to push the tooth 6 radially outwards when the planetary gear 7 reaches a position corresponding to a full turn (fig. 2), i.e. every four years.

This is in fact the rotation period of the satellite gear 7 around the pinion 8; for this purpose, the latter is supported by an arm 19 in a coaxial position with respect to the eccentric 1, extending radially with respect thereto starting from the wheel 2. Advantageously, the end of the arm 19 has a groove 19a which engages with a pin 8a projecting from the upper surface of the pinion 8, so as to substantially form a zigzag mechanism which transmits the rotation of the wheel to the pinion 8.

The slot 19a allows to compensate the relative movement between the arm 19 and the pinion 8 caused by the eccentricity of rotation during rotation, firstly integral with the program wheel 2 and secondly integral with the hypocycloidal wheel 1 which is eccentric with respect to the program wheel.

An arm 19 configured as a bridge above the eccentric 1 allows the planetary gear 7 to pass under it.

From what has been described so far, it can be understood how the device D according to the invention is able to solve the fundamental technical problem.

In fact, it is not difficult to recognize how in practice it is constituted by a gear train having a driving wheel 3 and a driven wheel 2 to which the eccentric 1 is internally connected; it follows that, through these three main components and the addition of the planet gears 7 and of the pinion 8, it is possible to obtain a perpetual calendar with a limited number of parts and compact dimensions, and therefore for a watch, as well as for a table or wall clock.

In fact, by using the concept of a flexible mechanism, the teeth 4-5-6 can be made integral with the body of the wheel 2.

Another result achieved by the device according to the invention is that it does not require an additional pointer or disc to indicate the date, month or leap year, but allows the information to be displayed immediately and therefore easier to read.

In fact, as can be seen, the indication of the date and month comes directly from the position of the eccentric 1 with respect to the wheel 2, whereas the indication of the year is generated indirectly by the movement of the planetary gear 7 associated with the eccentric.

According to a possible preferred embodiment, the months are displayed on the hypocycloidal wheel 1.

Even more preferably, this indication can be reported on a label, plate, cover or surface 25, also completely or partially transparent, applied to the side of wheel 1 opposite to that of gear 7 and pinion 8; the surface may also comprise one or more openings 24 through which corresponding information can be displayed, for example the year in the case of fig. 4, but also other information.

It should also be emphasized that the principles may be applied more broadly and generally to all indications that may be used in a tabulation, such as day of the week, phase of the month, zodiac signs or colors, etc.; in this case, it is also possible to display the desired indication on the driven wheels 1 and 2 or to use the seven teeth 9-15 thereon to control additional gears.

In this case, it should be noted that the principles disclosed herein may also be used to indicate other functions of the clock, such as the load level of the clock.

Various types of indices may be used to display the load level, such as alphanumeric (e.g., score 1/4,1/2,3/4 or P for full, M for low, B for low, or the like) or color (e.g., green, yellow, red), hybrid solutions, and so forth.

The device D thus conceived is in any case reliable, has a limited number of parts with respect to those known in the art, and does not require lubrication, since the tooth coupling is substantially of the shape type, without generating high friction.

For this purpose, it should be noted that the profile of the gear flanks shown in the figures is of involute type circumferentially, since this facilitates torque transmission by reducing friction; however, other profiles may be used, for example for the eccentric 1, the profile of the teeth may be cycloidal.

However, all such variations are within the scope of the following claims.