Making A UNIX Clock While Making A Few Mistakes Along The Way

unixclock

Sometimes the projects we think are easy to design are the ones on which we end up making the most mistakes. The UNIX clock that you see in the picture above is one of these projects. For our readers that don’t know it, UNIX time is the number of seconds since 00:00 on January 1st 1970. The clock that [James] designed is based on an Arduino Pro Mini board, an RTC chip to store the time, a custom made display board and two buttons to set the date/time.

One of the mistakes that [James] made was designing the boards on which will be soldered the seven-segment displays before actually choosing the ones he’ll use, as he was thinking they’d be all the same. The displays he ended up with had a different pitch and needed a different anode voltage, so he had to cut several traces on the PCBs and add another power supply. It also took [James] quite a while to remove the bits that his hackerspace’s laser didn’t cut through. We strongly advise a good look at his very detailed write-up if you are starting in the electronics world.

If you find this Unix time display too easy to read here’s one that’s a bit more of a challenge.

15 thoughts on “Making A UNIX Clock While Making A Few Mistakes Along The Way

      1. the Y2K bug was because of a limit of 2 decimal places obviously in decimal. ie there was no distinction between 2000 and 1900 as only the 00 was stored.

        Unix time is binary and has a fixed binary width that limits it to storing from 1970 to 2038. After that it becomes 1970 again. Most web servers use unix time.

        1. Yes i know that, i was making fun of the use of Y2k38.

          the ‘k’ in that syntax usually means a decimal, and then the whole number multiplied by 1000. 2k38 would be 2.38 * 1000 = 2380. Not 2038.

          The system is usually associated with component value markings where decimal points could easily get misprinted or rubbed off, and space is limited. A component value of for example 2.9 megaohms could be written as 2M9.

  1. Here is how you use the word “an” as opposed to “a”
    https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/591/01/

    For words that start with U, it depends on the way the word sounds. If ‘U’ is pronounced ‘you’ like US ‘you-es’ then you use “a”. If ‘U’ is pronounced like ‘uh’ like uprising ‘uh-pry-zing’ then you would use “an”.

    Thus, UNIX ‘you-nix’ would be “a”. Making a UNIX Clock While Making a Few Mistakes Along the Way.

    1. Are you certain that Mathieu pronounces Unix “you-nix”? It seems at least as likely that he pronounces it “oo-nix” as that he doesn’t know which article to use before a noun.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.