I'm new at this so I'm having a hard time getting started. I Would like to make a birthday down counter using the DS3231. it counts down to the date then once it gets to that date it displays a Birthday message on the LCD. My issue is with getting the time from the DS3231 separately days alone, hours alone, minutes alone. In libraries I've used for the DS3231 that wasn't the case, and i found it hard to manipulate the data in order to get what i want.
It's actually fairly easy.
Use on of the DS3231 libraries like:
and once you create a datetime object and read the RTC in to it you can just access each one of the time values separately.
See this library's examples.