This shield could be ideal for a fancy wall mounted analog clock: 60 outputs which drive 60 leds (for example, high brightness, white leds). One led for each minute (6 degrees), closing the circle. Leds are soldered in order to project each light beam almost parallel to the wall surface (it's preferable to use very narrow beam leds).
The project is very, very simple, since the software must basically drive in a very clever manner 60 different outputs (2 pushbutton inputs for time setting and/or IR input to do the same job).
The hardware part is also quite simple: if we don't want to rely on Arduino clock settings, we only need to add an RTC to the Arduino in order to keep the time as stable as possible. For the code, it's up to our fantasy to find a way to display the time. Some ideas:
- All leds are powered off except led (or group of 2, 3, 4 or more) to show the hour; slow blinking led (or group) to show the minutes and optionally fast blinking led (leds) to show seconds;
- All leds are powered on (pay attention to maximum sink/source current from IC) and 2 different blinking rates to show hours and minutes: this way the clock could be used also as a very original wall mounted lamp/clock!
- More ideas, please! (consider that you can find other purposes for this gadget, not only a clock, but: countdown timer, analog thermometer, vu-meter, whichever-physic-environmental-variable-meter...)