Equinox Clock

September 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

The Equinox clock is made up of simple parts but a combination of fine design and precision make it a gem of a timepiece. The guts are made up of an Arduino, a DS1307 real time clock, twelve LED drivers, and sixty RGB LEDs. These combine with a capacitive touch interface to tell the time using three lit blocks for the hours, one for the minutes, and a fading block for the seconds. See for yourself after the break.

To our delight, [Bram Knaapen] shared the specifics of the case. The black ring that makes up the body was laser cut and spray painted. He uses small blocks of acrylic that have been sandblasted to diffuse the light. This is also a great example of clean circuitry using interconnects between the different circuit boards.

We always enjoy seeing clocks no matter what level of finish is involved, but great design is something that makes us want to hang a project on the wall rather than stow it in a parts bin.

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DS1307 Breakout Board

July 26, 2010 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

Adafruit’s got a handy breakout board for the DS1307 RTC available. This chip isn’t nearly as accurate as the DS3231 used in the Chronodot but it’s quite a bit cheaper. The breakout makes this easy to breadboard or plug into an Arduino and has everything you need; clock crystal, a backup battery, filtering capacitor, and pull-up resistors. Our favorite part is that Adafruit designs are open source so you can etch the board yourself if you checkout the files from their git repository. This will make a great addition to our prototyping hardware collection.

Incidentally, we were surprised to see the choice of 2.2k resistors for the I2C bus pull-ups. We were under the impression that 4.7k was a standard value here. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.

[via Dangerous Prototypes]

Color Clock Makes Telling Time Impossible

June 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

[Bogdan] set out to build the all-too-familiar binary clock. But, he didn’t want to be ordinary, and set the goal of making the clock as hard to read as possible. What he ended up with is a clock that is almost impossible to read correctly.

He’s using colors to tell the time. We immediately thought this might make use of resistor codes as the display but it doesn’t. Red shows the hours, green for minutes, and blue for seconds. Now stack all of them on top of each other in binary and you’ve got the time. That means you’ve got to know all of your color combinations, plus read the binary value correctly, to decipher the time. Add to that the display changing every second and we’re in trouble.

Aside from the user difficulty level, this is a really clean build. It uses an ATmega8535 in conjunction with our favorite DS3232 RTC chip. The etched board is nice and clean, making for an aesthetically pleasing clock.

Six Digit LED Clock

June 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

Got a bag of LEDs handy? Why not build a display with them? We’ve seen a lot of clocks that make use of LED modules but soldering your own is a fun pastime. [Vadim Suhovatih] did just that using 130 LEDs to build this clock. Each segment of the 7-segment digits consists of three LEDs in parallel which are switched by some 2N4401 transistors. An ATmega328 in the form of an Arduino controls the device with the aid of a DS1307 real-time clock for timekeeping and a 4017 decade counter to assist with scanning the display. Check out the demo after the break.

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Clock Hides Time Until You’re In Close Proximity

April 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Alan] is branching out beyond the Arduino with this clock. He’s still using the same code but built this board around an ATmega328 and the components he needed, saving his Arduino board for further development. The concept uses a character display housed in an old iPod Touch case. The build relies on an infrared sensor to actuate the LCD backlight. The closer your hand is the brighter the light.

The Maxim DS3232 RTC chip keeps time in this application. We’ve seen this little marvel used before, popular because it uses temperature compensation to maintain accuracy. If you’re interested in this part, check out the library file that [Alan] wrote for it.

PIC Pong Clock

February 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Andrew] built this pong clock over the span of a couple of days. The PIC 18f2520 he used can serve as a real time clock with the addition of an external clock crystal. His project proves the usefulness of an oscilloscope as poor board layout caused interference in the crystal connections, something difficult to troubleshoot without this handy lab tool.

Pong clocks have been quite popular. This one is nice because it’s easy to throw together now that [Andrew’s] done the coding work for you. Written in assembly, reading and understanding his code might be a good exercise if your low-level language skills are lacking.

Binary Clock Uses DS3232 RTC

February 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

[Kenneth Finnegan] quenches our clock-a-day compulsion with his Arduino based binary timepiece. The clock uses a 5×7 LED matrix as a display and shows month, day, and time. He sourced a DS3232 real-time clock which automatically compensates for temperature to achieve very accurate time keeping. We like the super-cap circuit he added to keep the RTC running if the power is cut.

Is an Arduino overkill here? Well, the code is certainly not filling the 16k available on the ATmega168. At $4.32, the $1-2 you could save by using a lower-grade chip is not worth having to rewrite the code developed during prototyping. [Kenneth] also mentions that these projects usually only hang around for a few weeks before they’re re-purposed for the next endeavor.

Take a look at [Kenneth’s] superb hardware walk through in the video after the break. If you’re a fan of clean breadboarding, he’s also made a time-lapse of the circuit building process.

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