Further work on my "Alarm Clock" I wanted an alarm function that could play WAV files from an SD card. This will allow tailored alarms for each alarm to be played.
Hey all, been a while, very busy at work. Anyway, my friend Tyson gave me a bag of these Siemens PD3435 LED displays. They are a really neat retro LED display that's remarkably good. They would have been expensive in their day. I needed a way to test the devices as all 20 or so were jumbled together in a bag with no anti-static protection. I ended up making a simple testing shield for an Arduino.
The devices are very feature-full and much nicer to deal with than the DLG2416s I have laying around. They have features like display dimming, display blinking, character blinking that the DLG simply doesn't. Plus the characters are larger and much easier to read for the given package size.
I intend to use two displays to make a 8 character clock. Here is a video showing the concept and also me fiddling with a gray-code rotary encoder.
This is a simple 24 hour clock I built using a pair of DLG2416s and a PIC18F252 I had floating around. I build this a while ago but never got around to posting it on the website.
It uses a watch XTAL on the secondary timer input to count the seconds. It's a little inaccurate mostly because I've not trained the timer offset particularly well. Whereas a clock chip will do that automatically. Given it's point-to-point construction and it's lax construction it functions pretty well.
Well I've just put the finishing touches on the boards and set the design off to custompcb.com. I did find I stuffed up the footprint for the rotary switches (oops!). So that's been fixed. I've gone over it with a fine tooth comb now and couldn't find any more errors. I've also check all the components on a print out and they all fit just fine.
Another boring update, I've moved the screw terminals and the input dials into the center of the board for better case layout. I've also moved the LED into a more visible location rather that being buried on the board between all those SMD parts.
I've found a better sized 16V zener diode that uses a SMA403D package rather than the ugly and large SOD223.
Made some adjustments to the board. I decided I should put the regulator on the backside so that it has access to the large copper layer for heat sinking. The regulator can easily be hand soldered once the upper components have been re-flowed. I'm planning on using the tried and tested "toaster oven" method of production for these boards as a number of the parts I've used would be hard to solder with my hot air work station.
Due to other family members requesting the same Speedo Healing goodness my brother has thanks to my little board I decided I should put together a more "professional" board with a custom PCB.
So here it is!
It's basically the same layout as my previous one which is based on a Silicon Chip design from a few years ago.
My brothers VTR1000F has had it's motor rebuilt after it chewed through it's valves one day. His bike has never had a very accurate speedo and it always seemed to be reading fast. So after he got his engine fixed and back together I had a look at all the cabling and the speedo itself. The speedo signal is simply a TTL pulse with a varying frequency. At first we though the sensor was busted, so we replaced it with another. But in the end it would appear that the original owner of the bike had changed the front and rear sprockets up and down a tooth each giving an error at the meter of over 20%!.
