September 10, 2014

Build a POV clock with Arduino and an old hard drive

It's great to see imagination at work, and with this project we're certainly surprised at what can be done with a disused hard disk drive. In this example the rotating platter has been re-purposed into the face of a clock which uses persistence-of-vision and RGB LEDs to display the time. 

A notch on the rotating platter is illuminated using the LEDs and using some clever code it is highlighed at the precise time in order to give the illusion of two "hands" of an analogue clock. Check out the following video to see what we mean:

Furthermore the clock can be altered via an infra-red remote control so mounting it on a wall and out of reach isn't a problem. For more details and design files to start your own, visit the project's Instructable pageAnd for more, we're on facebooktwitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.

The most important part of any clock or timer-based 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.

Leave a comment

Comments have to be approved before showing up.