Bulbdial redux

posted Nov 15th 2009 12:25pm by Jakob Griffith
filed under: home hacks

[Taufeeq] sent in his “Circle of Light” bulbdial clock. You may remember when we showed you Evil Mad Scientist’s version a while back, and [Taufeeq] did use it as a base but he’s added some of his own little touches. Some of the changes include using a PIC with an RTC chip instead of AVR, which allowed him to shrink the board down small enough to fit behind the clock face, rather than on front. He’s even zipped everything up conveniently to help you build your own.

Comments [9]

tagged: AVR, bulbdial, circle of light, clock, led, pic, rtc

9 Responses to Bulbdial redux

xGROMx says:

November 15, 2009 at 12:42 pm

WOW! Now this is great! I am working on a clock with rope lights and 110v. But this is way more original. Congrats with this.

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Abbott says:

November 15, 2009 at 1:38 pm

awesome design. i would have probably done 60 led’s for the second hand, either that or tried slowly varied the light from one led to the other, to give the idea of the hand moving.

great design though.

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Wwhat says:

November 15, 2009 at 8:54 pm

With 60 LED you’d have to have an addressable driver for each led and wiring too, it’s a bit more troublesome than it sounds offhand.

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Taufeeq Elahi says:

November 15, 2009 at 11:52 pm

@Abbott : Yes Wwhat is right, talking about 60 LEDs and putting them there in reality are two very different things. It is sure possible to build a driver to drive 60 LEDs but the circuit will become more complex. The actual problem is the wiring a mounting so many LEDs. (neatly). I did think about it when i started the project, but finally decided to go with the KISS approach. ( Keep It Simple, Stupd!)

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Ryan Leach says:

November 16, 2009 at 1:17 am

you could always charlieplex the 60 leds… that would shrink down the pincount…

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Roly says:

November 16, 2009 at 1:31 am

No matter what drives it, that’s a seriously cool display.

If you are going to do one 60-LED deck, you may as well do all three for an even more analog effect.

Elegant design. +1

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vic says:

November 16, 2009 at 5:14 am

60 LEDs can be wired in an 8×8 matrix. Since only one is lit at a time you’d only need 2 shift registers, transistors would be optional. It’s not complex, but probably a pain to wire. Is it worth it? That’s another question.

Anyway, that’s a pretty good design.

One little remark: CC 3.0 is not public domain.

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ping says:

November 16, 2009 at 7:05 am

I would even like it better if there where only 3 LEDs rotating around the center pin.

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urlax says:

November 16, 2009 at 7:52 am

I love how the height affects the hands length
it’s a simple effect of dropping shadows, and i think this is a great hack!

would there be some way by doing this with one row of leds and a variating pin in the middle? without making much noise?

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