Here is something that will definitely catch the attention of your guests, although the project’s author wasn’t lucky enough with the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). A laser beam showing the time on one of your walls, an unusual clock indeed and very easy to build.

Tracking the time is done by an Atmel Attiny24 microcontroller. It feeds a PWM signal to a servo motor that rotates the laser. The laser, controlled by the Atmel and driven by a npn transistor, can be set as a continuous line or pulsating. A crystal oscillator is used for best accuracy. Connector J1 is used to set the time and for settings, using a jumper. It can be set to show hours or seconds for example. Of course you could replace this with push buttons and/or switches.

It’s best to adjust time at fixed hours otherwise you will have to count seconds to adjust minutes. Also depending on the type of servo motor you will be using you might need to play with the values of servo’s rotation span. There is a version available using the Arduino.

The code is written in C and it is very well commented and that comes in very handy if you want to add some modifications. There are some things you will have to look out for when recompiling. Circuit diagram and code are available in the project as well as pictures and a video of the sundial.

Laser Sundial: [Link]

The author made the project for a friend who wanted to include it into an amplifier as an extra function. The project turned out really well and it works flawless. It’s based on the ATmega8 and it uses a 4 digit 7 segments common anodes led display to show the time. The code is pretty simple, written in C, but it lacks comments as the author did not felt the need to add them.

4 Digit ATmega8 Clock: [Link]

Daniel build this clock after having to chose from a watching a movie or working on a project. Obviously he and hi’s friend chose to make the clock so it wassn’t long until the LED’s started to light up. The clock code is based on the open-source-arduino-clock by Rob Faludi. Daniel made many changes, but the time counting the basically the same. So if you want to make another kind of clock, I suggest you to take a look on that code.

Arduino Based Binary Clock: [Link]

This project is based on the previous one posted and here the DCF77 runs the clock from the thermostat always on the right time synchronizing not beeing necessary anymore. The temperaturesensor is a DS1820 or DS18B20 and on a HD44780 (or compatible) 2×16 LC-Display becomes day, date, time, temperature (with 0.1°C precision) and an indication which temperature adjustment (economy- or comfort temperature) is active.

For each day there are 4 ON/OFF times to program, ON means here switch to the comfort temperature and OFF to the economy temperature.
A handy option is for people who work at different times (shift work) because it is possible to program the clock with a 2-weeks scheme.

As you can see a really complex program has been created for this project which makes it really handy for those who need it.

DCF77 Clock-Thermostat: [Link]

This project make use of a PIC16F628(A) and a DCF77 receiver from Conrad. Optional there is a possibility to connect an electronic gong on it. Every second is on PORTA.1 (pin 18) a pulse from 0.5 second. This signal isn’t necessary for anything, but maybe you want to connect a LED on it, so that these wil blink every second, or a piezo buzzer, so that the clock ticks as an analog clock.

Overall the project is great and someone put allot of work into designing it.

Digital DCF77 clock with LCD and gong: [Link]

It’s a good idea to use LCD’s with projects like this instead of led digits, because LCD’s don’t need to be refreshed, they allow you to display many characters and it requires less I/O pins. In this project a 16×1 LCD Display with 4-bits interface it’s used. Time and date are displayed as HH:MM:SSx mmm dd, where: HH = Hours MM = Minutes SS = Seconds x = AM/PM mmm = Month (Jan, Feb, Mar) dd = Day.

LCD Display with Date and Time: [Link]

This clock counts seconds, minutes, hours and day of the week. Time is displayed on 4 seven segment LED displays, and is adjustable with three buttons at start time (up, down, enter). You can program the day of the week, hour, minute and duration of the alarms.

The number of alarms are limited by ROM space only. The alarm is on the RA4 open collector output of the PIC, and is repeated on a decimal point of the display. For once, the program is in BASIC (mikroBasic) and this should make a good start for beginners.

PIC16F84A Alarm Clock: [Link]

T-Clock is a demo-application for Philips LPC2000 ARM7TDMI controller with a KS0108/KS0107-based graphics-LCD (128*64 pixels), DCF77 time-receiver and one wire bus (for DS18x20-Temp.-Sensor).

The time and date are received with a DCF77-receiver-module. The DCF77-signal is transmitted from a station near Frankfurt/Main, Germany and can be received all over Europe, North Africa and the Middle-East. Please visit www.ptb.de and ask google with “DCF77″ for more information. In times when the DCF77-signal is not available (i.e. thunder and lightning near transmitter) the RTC of the LPC-controller is used to drive the clock.

The clock also display the temperature measured trough a DS18x20 family sensor. he sensors provide the temperature in digital form on a One-Wire-Bus. The Maxim Web-Site has a lot of information on the One-Wire-Bus.

The whole project should cost you about 100 Euro’s, not cheap but a very good and interesting project for ARM microcontrollers.

T-Clock An ARM7 Controlled Blue LCD Clock: [Link]

This is a small ajustable clock, I made based on PIC16F84A microchip.The hardware part is very simple because it only uses 74hct238 demultiplexer, 4×7 segments, and some rezistors. The software part is programmed through a device connected to serial port with icprog and made/debuged with MPlab.

Digital Clock Based On PIC16F84A: [Link]

This ATmega48 based wall clock is able to keep any kind of score and display it on its 4 digits. The score is controlled by a IR remote control powered by an ATtiny28. Also trough the remote you can set the time and configure the clock. The digits are build on pcb with 5 mm LED’s, no commercial LED digits were used.

Wall clock that controlled trough IR also keeps your score: [Download Project] – [View Project PDF]