I’m happy to say that the clock is still running happily at CrossFitGordon. Couple of filler and sanding intervals and it was time to paint. I then ripped a slot for the plexiglass and then carved out the end so the backing would fit. Using a table saw that someone gave me years ago and some wood molding, I came up with a BOX. In the end, I used the smoke AFTER I painted the front flat black. I ordered up some plexiglass from McMaster and another site (forget) and learned that I can’t pick colors worth a damn. I needed to find (really build) a box that could be hung up and not look like a DIY project gone wrong. I was finding, like most projects, that finishing this thing was going to be the final crux. You’ll see in the pics that I even mounted it right on the board instead of having to wire it externally. ![]() So what about the code? Cmon timing is easy! There are tons and tons of tutorials out there on how to time and even more on how to include RTC chips. Here’s a quick video with a 1 chip smoke test This was a HUGE help as many pieces that I ordered were much different than the pkg/layout that I was using on the board. ![]() I then pushed the different components in to see if they fit. Another tip is that I printed out the board and taped it on a piece of styrofoam. The 2 grounds were never connected for some reason. I should say (with my head down) that I did need 1 jumper when the boards came in. I used the free version of Eagle to design the whole thing. They turned out great and the price wasn’t too bad. that would handle this so I figured it was time to design another PCB! In the end, I picked PCB Fab Express for my boards. Yet another set of numbers and names and this time it was a current SINK chip (which simply means that it just grounds stuff) … my common anode (POWER) LEDs would hook up to these nicely. I stumbled on a chip called the tpic6a596. While there are plenty of great tutorials on shifting ( 2), none seemed to handle the load of these large LEDs. I learned about I2C and all the fun that comes from using those libraries with Arduino.Īfter all that testing and playing around I needed to start looking at registers and shifting. Tronixstuff did a wonderful tutorial on this. I then tried some SAA1064 4-digit LED display drivers. Now I was onto darlington arrays and UDN2981 and ULN2803 chips I thought about using the max7219 chip but it needed common cathode (CC) digits and the large ones were CA and that max chip could only handle so much current and I needed to switch the high/low because of the CC LEDs. We put +POWER to the common anode and then ground all the others (with resisters, etc, etc) and she’ll light up! After some reading and testing, I found that all this means is that, for common anode (CA), there is one anode pin that all the other pins share. The issue was a common cathode or common anode… no idea! Not to mention that my buying spree had set me up with a bunch of common cathodes and now these large digits were common anodes. My design quickly changed from the Matrix to LED segments. Sparkfun had a great write up on a wall clock and another one for a BricoClock. From here I started to ditch the matrix and move to large LED boards.Ĭhecking online I found some 8″ Large LED displays. This actually worked pretty well but I was making things more and more complicated. This was a fun challenge as I was burning up digital pins as 4 pins would only give me 16 states (2^4) and I needed some control pins, etc, etc. The slave would bit bang some digital lines and when the master was ready to read it would look and gather up the bits and tell the slave it’s all read. My solution was to use 2 Arduinos! One would be the master refresh and the other the reader for the IR. As I was reading in a button from the remote, I would refresh and miss the rest of the IR code. ![]() Then I found that my refresh rate was screwing up my IR reads from the remote. This pushed me to rewrite some code to change fonts. This display worked very nicely but I found that I wanted bigger fonts or smaller fonts so I could write more on the one screen. My first thought was to use the adafruit 16×32 display. Looking at each piece I would breadboard the very simplest design (learn, discover, etc) and then incorporate that into my design move on. There were many things I didn’t know how to use/do/code before I started. Let’s break this project into pieces… actually that’s how I approached this.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |