Arduino WordClock

I'm not really much of an exhibitionist but here are some pics of my second arduino project. The first project was an almost identical clock that I built as a prototype to learn about the arduino. This second clock was built because the stripboard I had to buy was big enough to build a second more refined model. The first clock has been going strong for several months now and this second one has been finished and working well for about 2 months.

image001.jpg

image002.JPG

image003.jpg

image004.jpg

More pics

The large PCB was tending to warp so used a piece of acrylic as a backing frame.
I was also hoping there would not be to much bleed between LEDs but had to put some baffles in. Ended up using black plastic straws for this.

image005.jpg

image006.jpg

image007.jpg

image008.jpg

and yet more...

After thinking about how to do the letter mask for several days I hit upon the idea of just inverse & backward laser printing them on a piece of white paper and sandwiching this between a piece of 3mm thick dark tinted acrylic and a 2mm thick clear acrylic. The dark tint works well to hide any detail when viewed from the front of the clock so you don't see the letters. The 2mm clear backing sits directly on the LED's as I had calculated the LED spread so it lit the entire letter and not just the middle of it.

image009.jpg

image010.jpg

image011.jpg

image012.jpg

and more...

image013.jpg

image014.jpg

image015.JPG

and finally...

Clock7.pdf (66.6 KB)

Clock_v6006.ino (47.8 KB)

Print Drawing6 - Reversed & Pathed.pdf (12.6 KB)

WordClock Libraries.zip (13.9 KB)

Very nice job, I want one.

Hi Everyone, Riva Specially.

Congratulations for your nice job; well done!
It looks really, really nice indeed.

If you don't mind, I would like to ask you two things:

  • The list of materials;
  • the real size of the display itself (letter to letter, diagonal)

I will definitly build at least one for myself.

Thanks

saturno:
If you don't mind, I would like to ask you two things:

  • The list of materials;
  • the real size of the display itself (letter to letter, diagonal)

I have not done a bill of materials. Some parts I already had laying around. Give me a few days to compile a list.
The overall size of the clock frame (in millimetres) is 232 high x 232 wide x 42 deep.
The acrylic clock face is 200 x 200.
The active text area where the LED's sit is approx 114 wide x 107 high.
Each LED is spaced 7.62mm apart horizontally (16 LED's) x 15.24mm vertically (8 LED's) that works out about 17 diagonally letter to letter.

Riva,

Thank you for the details.
As for the bill of materials, I was only referring the electronic components.
Would it be too much work to get it? It is not a hurry; when your time and will permits ....
Thank you for sharing.

Attached is a list of components/materials used to build this clock. Unfortunately I will probably have missed a couple of sundry items as it took me months to find/build all the bits I needed.
I have also attached the InkScape http://inkscape.org/ clock face should people need to change the wording. When you have it right you need to convert to paths and vertical mirror it ready for printing on laser printer.

Clock BOM.txt (1.33 KB)

Drawing6.svg

Hello Riva,

Sorry if I took you time from your rest in the weekend...
Thank you very much for all your valuable information

The clock face is also very appreciated as I would like to translate it to Portuguese, though I know that will not be easy, mainly because the Portuguese translation will increase the size of the words. I'll see what I can get.

Thank you very much.

Luís

saturno:
The clock face is also very appreciated as I would like to translate it to Portuguese, though I know that will not be easy, mainly because the Portuguese translation will increase the size of the words. I'll see what I can get.

There are few spare characters and some even double up sharing last character of one word as first character of next so it may be tight. Good luck

Hi Riva

Would you consider releasing the source code for your clock?

DillyDog:
Would you consider releasing the source code for your clock?

The source code is attached to post #4

I didn't catch this until today. Awesome! Definitely a huge step up from the original word clock, especially with the scrolling text thing!

liudr:
I didn't catch this until today. Awesome! Definitely a huge step up from the original word clock, especially with the scrolling text thing!

The first version without scrolling was programmed into a ATmega8 and had about 68 bytes of flash free so I un-soldered the chip and replaced with a 328 to give the extra space to do scrolling. Apart from scrolling the date on request and temperature every x minutes (x because I have altered the code since posting) it also has programmed dates you can scroll custom messages for. I have family birthdays, anniversary's, Christmas day & new years day that scroll every 15 minutes on the programmed day.

This is a very neat piece of electronics. You should think about selling kits. Besides regular schedules, you can program in random jokes or "Arduino rocks" or else to go off.

Thank you Riva, didn't notice! I'm working on a small desk clock, only 150mm square, and I think your code is the best I've seen!

DillyDog:
Thank you Riva, didn't notice! I'm working on a small desk clock, only 150mm square, and I think your code is the best I've seen!

Thanks, it was the first arduino project so coding may be a bit poor to seasoned C++ programmers but it works. Have fun building it, I did.
The overall size apart from the frame is 200mm square but I do have a large(ish) border around the LED's so the design would probably fit in 150mm square. Because I built the electronics on proto board that limits the size options as your limited to the 2.54mm hole grid. A custom PCB would be nice as you can size as needed. I am also considering using 4x led matrix blocks to build another one but it's hard to find a cheap 8x8 led matrix that uses white LED's, most all are red or green.

Let me know if you find white ones. I've been using smd ones but it's very time consuming and fiddly soldering them by hand.