Easter is over and with some plastic eggs still on hand, [Franspaco] was looking for something to do with them. He decided to use an egg as an enclosure for a digital clock.
You can see that the finished project uses just one 7 segment LED display to show the time. A scrolling number method is used to delineate each digit of the 24-hour time readout. The display will go blank, followed by two numbers for the hours, a dash as a separator, and finally two more digits for the minutes. A PICAXE microcontroller drives the clock, but for accuracy a DS1307 does the timekeeping.
[Franspaco] etched his own circuit board that is sized to fit perfectly, housing the two chips, an LED, and a programming header. The on-board LED blinks at 1 Hz, giving some inner glow to the plastic shell. He accomplished most of his goals, but was unable to fit the batteries inside of one egg, prompting the need for a tethered power-egg. If he moves to surface mount components for the next generation of this device we think he’ll have no problem fitting a small battery (like an A23) inside.
Well that’s just plain cute.
Nice!
Build quality could be better, but nice little project.
Cool, interesting idea. I like small, simple projects like this.
Analog would be way cooler.
It’s eggzactly 4 o’clock.
[groan]
It needs an egg timer function.
[grin]
Maybe in a future version he can get a small li-ion or something in there and make an inductive charger. He could make a whole dozen and turn an egg crate in to the charging base.
@Ren
you crack me up.
Very interesting and colourfully.
Oh, wow, I was 14 back then, I always love finding this article again. Thanks guys!