If you enjoy reading about or making different types of clocks, consider this project by engineer Kenneth Finnegan. His example uses a 5x7 LED matrix to display the time and date data in binary form. Apart from giving the user a mathematical problem every time they read the time, it's an interesting project in itself - and is quite accurate due to the use of a DS3232 real-time clock IC. Kenneth takes us through the clock in the following video:
With a little extra work this could be mounted in an enclosure for a final product. Kudos to Kenneth for his interesting and well-documented project. And for more, we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.
The most important part of any clock project is the inclusion of an accurate real-time clock IC. Here at Freetronics we have the Maxim DS3232 real-time clock IC module:
Apart from keeping accurate time for years due to the temperature-controlled oscillator and having a tiny coin-cell for backup, it is very simple to connect to your Arduino project. A driver library allows your program to easily set or read the time and date. Perfect for clock projects, dataloggers or anything that needs to know the date and time. Furthermore it contains a digital thermometer and 236 bytes of non-volatile memory to store user settings and other data. For more information, check out the module page here.
