I’ve been working on a prototype for a large clock I want to make. This clock will feature 6.5inch digits for the Hours, Minutes & Seconds and will feature 4inch tall displays for the Month & Day readout. Being as I am going to hang this clock up at work, It will likely be high up on the wall and out of reach. So when I started thinking about how to program this clock, I thought wireless would be the perfect solution. With the xbee radios from digi being so cheap and easy to implement this seemed like the perfect fit. I then started thinking about how else I could pimp this thing out and I thought it would be nice to have a remote viewer on the “clock setting device”. This screen will display real time information being fed from the clock on the wall as well as have intuitive menus for setting it.
To realize all of this, I wanted to proof out as much of my code as possible on the small scale before implementing it on the final design. Besides, I need to wait for some of the circuit boards I designed for this to come in from China (about 4-6 weeks).
Here are a few pics of the small scale prototype, work in progress.
Here is a youtube video showing an overview of the project…
why the colon mark ir lagging?
It’s flawed code. It on my list to fix. The goal was to have the colon blink twice a second. This makes tying it to a change in seconds not viable. I will either end up tying it to a millis() function or just decide to stop being anal and have it either be steady on or toggle anytime the seconds change (on 1 second, off 1 second). Setting up a timer interrupt might also work, but might introduce unneeded complexity.
Nice work. Keep it up!
Where did you get the large 7 seg displays?
Hello Andrew. Thanks!. The large 6inch displays are sold by sparkfun, see here… http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8530 The Chinese manufacturer makes a bunch of different sizes and colors (for example 12inch Blue!) but the price goes way up and I didn’t see a clear path to order from them directly. The 4 inch displays were salvaged so I don’t know where they can be purchased. I did track down the manufacturer for them at http://www.marktechopto.com, but they seem to only be B2B. I hope this helps.