Steve's Things

Well, for the past little while, I’ve been working on a bizarre clock made with LEDs glued into a dollar-store cookie sheet. I got the idea just out of the blue and decided that it would be fun to build. Now, it’s nearing completion so I figured it’d be prudent to document the miserable contraption. I guess I should go through the steps it took to get this thing running.

First, I took one of those dollar store cookie sheets and drilled it through for 40 LEDs. 12 for the hours, 12 for the minutes, 5 for the seconds, 5 more for the div/5 minutes and five more for the outside and the PM light.

Drilling it wasn’t much fun but, when it was finished, I started to insert the LEDs with the grounds all towards the outside of their respective circle. Then I mixed up some epoxy and drizzled it over the backs of the LED’s. Unfortunately, the epoxy didn’t hold very well on the other epoxy surfaces so I used hot glue to tie them down.

As you can see, I labeled it in reverse of the other side so that I could get ‘er working. Thus started the long job of soldering the whole thing.

The image show isn’t the complete one, but it took me several hours to solder it all together. I used 7 groups of 6 LEDs in order to display the image. In this case I used the 7 groups for the duty cycle, thus a 1/7 duty cycle was used. Each of the 7 groups is fed ground through an MPSA13 Darlington transistor. Here’s a picture of the board that controls it.

Pretty fucking ugly, I know. But it works and I used an MCU (PIC18F4685) that was a little overkill but that’s fine, I’ve got quite a few of those. Anyways, so far so good, though it seems a little impractical as a clock and I think I set the rings of the minutes and hours too close together. Oh well.