Author: Andrei
28/01/2019

If you are new to electronics, a simple project you could do is a clock. Counters, time and this kind of stuff is quite basic when talking of microcontrollers. But, to get decent precision time is not that easy. That's exactly what Greek Arduino Projects
YouTube channel made. An Arduino based clock with alarm configuration. In this way, he could wake up every morning and start working on his new projects.

The design is quite simple and uses an LDC screen to show time and date and to set the alarm time. He also designed the PCB and send it to a manufacturer ang get good quality PCBs.

To order your boards, use JLCPCB.com and select your color.

To get real time, he used a RTC or a real time clock chip. This chip, internally counts time with better precision than a microcontroller. It uses some sort of communication, in this case the DS1307 RTC chip uses i2c communication, to send the data to the microcontroller. It will give us the time, date, day of the week but also an alarm interrumption.

As we can see, on the left side of the screen we have the real time and date and on the other side, the time on which the alarm was set. When the alarm time is reached, a buzzer will give sound notifications. The setup is amde of the main PCB and the LCD screen. The PCB has push buttons so we could set time, alarm and so on...

He shares the schematic and the final PCB layout as well. We can see that he used the ATMEGA328 microcontroller, a potentiometer to set the LCD contrast, a cell battery to keep time even if the clock is not powered, 3 push buttons to set time and the DS1307 real time clock chip. The case of this project is 3D printed so the entire project is homemade. For more details, check his channel on Greek Arduino Projects and see more of his videos. Thank you.

And if you need PCBs, consider using the services of our sponsor JLCPCB.

Consider supporting ELECTRONOOBS on PATREEON.