LED Clock Project Intro

This is a bit of a round up of a completed project rather than a live diary. The project is an LED clock powered by a PIC. Here’s a shot of an early prototype and the almost finished v2.

First a bit of history.

It all started about a year ago when we visited the science museum in London. This is where I apologize to Ruth the things I make her do when we are on holiday. Walking for an hour in the freezing rain to the Berlin Technikmuseum would be another on the list… Anyway the museum was great, just like I remembered it from childhood but with even more buttons to press and some really cool exhibits on computing history. I loved the place… But something that really stood out in my mind was huge LED installation in the energy hall there’s a bit of a video of it here. I’d been playing around with PICs and LEDs for a while but not really gotten round to actually making anything useful. But seeing this really spurred me to do something. The hard part was to decide what. Picking a single thing and actually finishing it off properly whilst reigning in all the what if’s if pretty tough. I like to try things out with no particular end point in mind.

So…

I decided to make an LED pseudo analog clock. I thought I was being so original, but actually I’m not there are others that have been out there for a while, but hey, that’s life.

Here’s one, and Here’s another

What follows is a series of posts dealing with each section of the device.
This is mostly for my reference so I can actually remember what I did and why…

On to the project overview