Saturday, April 4, 2015

"Home-made", Wise Clock-based, Alpha Clock Five

I saw Justin's recent post on Alpha Clock Five and I just couldn't resist not to try it myself too. Since I didn't have that clock, I thought of improvising one by making a 5-character display that would plug into my Wise Clock 4 board. The idea was easy, the implementation not so. After many hours of hand-wiring, this is how it looks like.


The displays are 1" single digit alphanumeric (common anode) from sparkfun, now retired. They came with non-functional dots, probably the reason they were less than $2 each.
The spacing between the individual displays is forced by the protoboard.


The 2 boards are connected through the pairs of 2x8 headers. All pins used by Alpha Clock 5 to drive the displays are wired to the unused header on the Wise Clock 4 board.


Not to mention  that the software compilation and upload worked without any glitch (after downloading the very nice DS1307RTC library)

The only regret is that this clock lacks seconds. One extra display would have added lots of extra value, but probably lacked the cool factor (the "6-letter clock" requires a lot more memory to store all 6-letter words than the approx 50k required by the 5-letter-word collection).

You should try this at home :)

6 comments:

  1. How many displays can you drive with the hardware Florin?

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    1. This question has many answers :)
      Here is the quickest one: each 16-segment LED display is "activated" (sourced) by a transistor. So each auxiliary one requires an extra transistor (which would require an available processor output). So, I would say I could easily add another 5 (or more) displays.

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    2. Nick, why are you asking? Are you thinking of something?

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  2. ;-) Thinking you could make a larger version of the clock with scrolling words etc...or two rows go 6 showing different data...or...

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    1. I got it! Wise Clock 5! Great idea Nick!
      Scrolling will not be as smooth though (one pixel at a time). But with 8 characters, it should have a bigger capacity than Wise Clock 4 (which can display about 5-6 characters at a time).

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  3. Awesome. The bigger the better (obviously..;-).

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