More Making

[razinaber]

A few weeks ago I had the idea of making a clock. I wanted to make something a bit unusual and fulfilling the geek ideal of having lots of little blinking lights. It occurred to me it would be quite neat to have all the digits for the hours, minutes and seconds stacked up in columns. After a few variations I eventually came up with this design:

Comments

[razinaber]

One of the great appeals of the Arduino is it greatly simplifies the electronics, letting me use software rather than a great mess of chips and transistors etc. I know far more about writing software than electronics engineering so it's a perfect fit for me. For ~£15-20 it's a pretty negligible cost given the laser cut parts came to about £90 (would have been more like £60 if I'd gotten it right 1st time around). Also given the effects I wanted to do, it would have been really impractical not to use a programmable microcontroller to do the heavy lifting.

I have added an alarm function but I've not yet added functionality for setting it directly on the clock, so it has to be changed via flashing the Arduino with an updated version of the clock's sketch. I would like to do a network connected project at some point but the cost of the ethernet board is pretty high (£40 if I recall) and ideally I'd want it wireless, so it's not something I'd just throw at a project on a whim. I've been looking into making the lights dimable but I fear it may not be possible with the shift registers. As you may know, to dim LEDs electronically you're not actually varying the voltage they receive but changing the frequency with which you pulse them on and off. But yes agree that otherwise there are many cool possibilities such as using a passive infrared motion detector to activate the clock only when someone's in the room etc.