Tuesday, January 25, 2011

LED Pong Clock

Pong Clock
This clock is my version of Nick Hall's Pong Clock
.




He uses an Arduino UNO with prototyping shield to glue the logic bits and pieces together.

I wanted to make one that looks good, without using Arduino. So I designed a custom pcb for this clock, with all the goodies on a single board. So DS1307 RTC, buttons, LED's, backup battery, beeper, and a future IR interface. PCB design features a QR code with pcb version and maker, to add to the geekiness.




I sandwiched the boards between two sheets of acrylic, this makes it rocksolid. It's a very touchable brick on my desk now.





A sheet of automotive anti-sun film sticks to the front of the displays, to enhance contrast.

My firmware has minor modifications to the original; startup message, beeper function etc.

Firmware is a work in progress...





Fun project, with many thanks to Nick Hall. Visit his blog, he shares firmware sourcecode, thanks for that!

pcb design (in mirrored view)



Action shot...



On request, the circuit diagram..
Straightforward as can be..



9 comments:

Nick said...

Hey, amazing job - really professional looking finish. I'll have to get some perspex for mine too.

Love to see what else you come up with for it.

Nick

Erwin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Erwin said...

Thanks Nick, all in all it took me quite some time to get it finished this way.. Firmware is step 2 to work on. Thumbs up for your pong / ht1632 code.!

tictocdoc said...

What would it cost for you to etch a board for me? Please email me at tictocdoc@sbcglobal.net with the details if you're interested.

Daniele said...

Very good job and wonderfoul design ! could you post a picture of components ? with your pcb but without components list or assembly it's too difficult !

thank you so much

Daniele

Erwin said...

Hi Daniele,

Would you like to reverse engineer the design? It's not that hard, just an AtMega with surrounding glue logic, nothing fancy.

I could share the circuit design if you like.

Daniele said...

Hi Erwin thanks for your answer. I like pong clock and your pcb is well done. I found ds1307 in SMD, the atmega328 switch, but seems that you used a lot of SMD components. Did you use a 7805 voltage regulator ?

I would like to improve this project using a DS32khz N as cristal temperature compensed. in this way there will be a super precision time.

I hope you'll post more image as soon as possible.

Best regards

Daniele

Unknown said...

Nick,
I've made a couple versions of the pong clock, and this is a really cool improvement. I'd love to try and make this without the arduino board, and just use the atmega168 with your board design.
Any chance you can share the list of components on the board? or at least a clear photo of the final board soldered so I can get an idea of what you used?

Thanks!
Again, super awesome job.

Erwin said...

Hi John,
Please feel free to copy my design, no problem.
Just leave some form of reference to my name. :-)

My circuit diagram is also available on the post, last picture..
Component values are non critical.
resistors mostly 10k for pullups, capacitors are 100nf for decoupling.
Clock is supplied with 5 volts from a stabilised (phone) wall wart.
Let me know what you need specifically, I will share the board design file with you if you want.

gr,