Wise4Sure - Wise Clock with LED display from Sure Electronics

I was finally able to finish the "pre-prototype" of Wise4Sure, the version of Wise Clock that uses a 32x8 LED display from Sure Electronics. These LED matrices are single color (I have seen red, green and yellow so far), have a controller on board (Holtek1632) and can be bought for about US$10 (free shipping). Unbeatable. So, I could not resist the temptation of building Wise Clock around this display. Courtesy of Mr. Bill Westfield ("WestfW") who wrote the demo sketch (see here), displaying to the Sure LED matrix module becomes a trivial task. With a few small modifications (adaptations from the original 24x16 matrix to my 32x8), the sketch worked perfectly.

Another "improvement" is the introduction of the SD card. Previous versions of Wise Clock stored the text quotations in EEPROM, which had a few inconveniences:

- there was a limit of 32KB of storage;

- the process of loading the EEPROM was relatively complex and time consuming.

Replacing the EEPROM with an SD card solves these inconveniences and offers a few other advantages:

- quotations (or any message for that matter) can be changed/updated much easier, since it involves only the modification of a text file;

- quotations can be edited with a PC, directly on the SD card;

- there is no need to transfer the text, from a file on PC to Arduino, through serial port.

Integrating the SD card with Wise4Sure was the challenge. From h/w perspective, all SD solutions use the SPI (digital pins 10-13). As for the s/w, I opted for SDuFAT, from Arduino playground. It seems that this library is RAM hungry (I should mention that I did not look at the others, which may be as hungry). A big chunk of RAM, 512 bytes, is taken by the buffer that stores a sector after it is read from SD. (So, I assume that all other libraries should have this buffer as well).

After I eliminated some variables and functions which I did not use, everything (scrolling quotations) seemed to be working fine. Until I included the code for RTC (DS1307), when the returned time was consistently same bogus value. I narrowed the problem down to, again, memory (RAM) use. I adjusted my own text buffer a million times, until I got the RTC working. You may ask, as I did, what has the RTC got to do with the memory? Well, I can tell you, when the RAM is in "short supply", the time returned from RTC is just wrong (for example, "18:00" at all times). Keep in mind that RAM is consummed by the processor/program stack as well: the more functions are called, and the more parameters are passed, the more RAM is taken.

I said "pre-prototype" because, as SD card "shield", I used ladyada's Wave Shield. As for Arduino, I used my own Arduino clone, WiseDuino (just came up with the name, it used to be called Wise Clock, but this may lead to confusion). By the way, WiseDuino is now at revision 1.3 and the PCB is being manufactured by seeedstudio. I should be getting some boards soon and it seems that they will be also available for sale, under open source projects, from seeedstudio.com site.

In the end I got it working, so here it is in action (video).

The device is currently powered by 4 AA eneloop rechargeable batteries. The measured consumption is around 200 mA (as mentioned, using Wave Shield as SD card module). For practical purposes, this may require a wall wart power supply.

Next step is to build a real prototype, on perfboard, attached to the LED display board. Basically a whole Arduino, with an RTC and an SD card, with connectors for the LED display (pseudo) "shield".