VFD Clock with MAX6921

Projects Programming
1

Hello all,

I have been lurking on these forums for some time now but I finally decided to ask for some help with programming.

My plan is to make a four digit VFD clock with IV-11 tubes and to drive these I want to use the MAX6921 ( Mixed-signal and digital signal processing ICs | Analog Devices datasheet on the right) .

What I want to make is a clock that simply starts at 12:00 and starts running, no fancy menus or anything. Time will be set with two buttons; Button A increases the hours by 1, Button B increaes the minutes by 1. Pretty simply one would say but after looking at various other peoples code such as:

http://www.vonnieda.org/tc18

I am completely lost.
I do understand how to create the digit pattern in an effective way such as shown here: Arduino and 7 Segment LED But when I see other peoples examples driving the MAX6921 looks like voodoo to me . Can someone give me a hint/tip/example on how to get going with this project?

2

I found out that Max6921 Multiplexing a IV-18 VFD - rather dim display - LEDs and Multiplexing - Arduino Forum had an attachment with the complete code which made things a lot clearer. I have cleaned up the code a bit by stripping whatever I do not need. I think I'll add a RTC to make things easier.

There are a few errors that I should look into but at this moment I do not see what is wrong. (okay the missing RTC library is quite obvious)

EDIT: I just noticed that there does not seem to be any way to set the time with this piece of code or am I missing something.

arduino_6921.ino (5.34 KB)

3

Even though the topic exceeded 120 days, I dared to ask the question: How did you connect the MAX6921 pins to the VFD? Because I didn't see a statement in the code!