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

Love it

[ext_1080281]

That clock looks amazing. Well done on making such a stylish time piece.

Re: Love it

[razinaber]

thanks ^__^

[scatmania]

That's pretty funky.

I'll admit that my first thought was: An Arduino? For that little thing? Overkill! But then I stopped and thought about it, and realised that chips are so cheap... cheap as chips, I suppose... nowadays that there's no reason not to throw an Arduino at it, if it makes the development easier and gives you the capacity to, for example, expand it in the future (how about a built-in NTP server? or an alarm function? or the ability for the lights to dim or go out during night-time hours, unless it hears a noise?). The possibilities are endless.

Great project; thanks for sharing.

[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