Clock One

I wanted to build my first clock as quickly as possible while still waking up a few interesting fabrication processes. I decided to spin a custom printed circuit board using the Bantam PCB mill, and designed the case in Fusion360 to be laser-cut out of 1/8" plywood. The board hosts a Microchip SAMD21G18 microcontroller running an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express bootloader, and can be reprogrammed via a USB-C port which also provides power to the clock during operation. The microcontroller talks via I2C to a Microchip MCP7940 realtime clock, which manages a 32.768 kHz quartz osillator and a coin-cell battery back-up. For the display, I hacked apart a convenient 1-meter spool of APA104 addressible LEDs, which are diffused by a bit of typing paper and controlled using the Arduino FastLED library.

Files

fabrication files in *.dxf format
PCB files via KiCad 5.x, including symbols/footprints
Arduino firmware, without RTC or button support

Current Status

As of late March, basic clock functions work! It displays time, changes color once per minute, and knows to roll over minutes at :59 and hours at :23. I haven't implemented a clock setting function with the two onboard pushbuttons, so the easiest way to set the time is to plug the clock in at 16:48, its hardcoded power-on setpoint. I also haven't written a driver for the RTC, so the clock uses the built-in SAMD21 RC oscillator and Arduino millis() function, losing a somewhat pathetic ~half hour per day. But for now, it illustrates the concept I hoped to get across and I'm excited to work on other things.