November 22, 2013

How long until Christmas? Find out with Arduino

It's that time of year again when some of you or your younger family members may be counting down the days, hours and possibly minutes until Christmas or another special day. To add some fun and total accuracy to the countdown, consider making a "How long until..." timer described by physics professor Dr Ayers. His device is a simple Arduino-compatible that uses a clever sketch in conjunction with a real-time clock IC to determine the amount of time to a particular event down to the second, and displays the results on a typical LCD display - for example:

It's a quick project to put together, and could be a lot of fun and also useful for many other events - so to make your own check out the project page. And for more, we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.

 When making your own clock - don't skimp on timing accuracy - so consider using our real-time clock module based on the DS3232 - with a temperature-controlled oscillator it is highly accurate, and has an onboard backup battery for when the power dies and 236 bytes of non-volatile memory for user data.

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