LED clock

The second brightest clock besides the sun.

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Inspiration

My inspiration was the sun which is the most brightest clock. Looking at it, or at least trying to, made me realize that there were a few tiny problems with it. The first one it is hard to read because it is really bright. The second is that it is hard to look at it a few minutes latter and tell how much time has passed in seconds. The this problem is that it can not accurately be used to calculate what time it is when working late at night. Considering the sun is not an open source project, I decided it was necessary to make an improved clock. You might want to point out that there are many different clocks that would satisfy this requirement and you are partly right.

What it does

This clock does what every good clock does tell the time.

How we built it

For starters we decided it was needed to use RGB LED's, Atmega328p-pu, and a DS3231sn RTC. This is because it is what I had on hand.

Challenges we ran into

When working on this project I ran into many different problems. The first was the compiler could not figure out how to build a known good project. This was a matter of changing the Microcontroller target to the atmega328p-pu instead of its default.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of this clock that can accurately tell the time and display the time. It is more accurate than the common smartphones who every once and a while decide that daylight savings didn't just change and instead give you an incorrect time.

What we learned

What was learned is that avr-gcc based programming is not all that hard. My initial fear was that writing arv c code would be really hard in comparison to using the Arduino IDE with all of its nice friendly libraries. This fear was suppressed once i realized that Arduino IDE must use avr-gcc to build its projects. Then I realized that it is not much more that putting variables into memory addresses that are disguised as memory addresses. This meant that I could just find a function to wrap up the the twi, or i2c,in a function then I would not have to have large blocks of code I could hardly understand.

What's next for LED clock

A feature that allows for brightness control.

Code

Libraries used:

Built With

  • atmega328p-pu
  • avr-gcc
  • c
  • ds3231sn
  • ws2812b
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