#Led word clock pro#
#Led word clock software#

In displaying the time a few of things needed to be considered: With a time resolution of 5 minutes, this is not a critical activity and it is done every 5 seconds by counting elapsed milliseconds.

Manage Summer Time offset when the mode switch is long pressed.ĭisplay Update.

Manage time setup when the mode switch is double pressed.

Display the time as digits when the mode switch is pressed.

#Led word clock software#

The software for this project is available from my library site. The hardware was prototyped using available existing modules and an Arduino Uno, shown below. Any RTC that can provide this can be substituted with appropriate changes in the software.įinally, a momentarily-on switch is used for setting and displaying the time, and the project is powered through a USB socket. All we use are hours, minutes and seconds. The real time clock is either a DS3231 or DS1307 (I have my own libraries for these) module using the I☬ interface. As a word clock has a 12 hour clock cycle, only a few functions of the RTC are used – we don’t care about AM/PM, date or week day.

#Led word clock pro#

To simplify the sketch I use my MD_MAX72XX library to run the LED module, connected through an SPI interface to an Arduino Pro Mini. Once I was sure that the concept was valid, it was time to consider the system architecture. As a bonus, the paper also acted as a very satisfactory light diffuser. Testing confirmed this would work, with the LEDs able to shine through the paper. The idea was to print the mask on paper and cover the LED matrix. I created an appropriately sized WordClock Text Mask using Microsoft Word. In this implementation, the mask is in 3 sections – the top 3 lines for minutes, line 4 for past/to text, and the last 4 lines for the hour. A plan for how the words are built up is shown on the right (click to enlarge). Alternatives for some words are highlighted in green.Įach letter of the mask is aligned over one of the LEDs of the matrix. As you would expect, having a limited number of LEDs means there need to be compromises compared to the larger word clocks, with some words split up. Fortunately the hard work of creating the word matrix for an 8×8 format was done by Adafruit for their project.

The word matrix is the main ‘display’ for a word clock and is the starting point for the design, as everything else fits around that. The challenge I set myself was making it as small as I could. It seemed to me that I could build a mini version using 8×8 monochrome LED matrix run by a MAX7219 IC. My inspiration for this project comes from the Adafruit website, where an 8×8 neopixel matrix is used to create a colorful Word Clock. In an era when super-accurate digital clocks are available to most people on the planet, it intrigues me that Word Clocks have a place as they only show the time to the nearest five minutes!īuilding one has been on my project to-do list for a while, but I didn’t want to invest the time and money needed for the various ‘from scratch’ build projects that I found online. A Word Clock is a clock that tells the time using words.