Neopixel Bedroom Clock

Finally took some pictures of the thing...

here, the mirror finish is clear, and the dot along the bottom is showing about 20 seconds into the min.

here we have the back view, Arduino nano in the middle, RTC on the right and a block of plasticard on the left (so it sits flat on the wall)

the LDR kinda pokes up above the parapet and is held in place with a globule of hot-melt glue.

all of the wires... these are to try to distribute power evenly as the traces on the board (+5V) don't seem to work too well.

it may be hard to see, but the LEDs have got blobs of thick black paint (car touch-up paint) on them to help prevent light leakage in a dark bedroom

Its been a couple of weeks and the new RTC (DS3231) is performing wonderfully, also the extra power wires have done the job, just wish i had access to a 3D printer to make an enclosure, ah well.

Ok, the DS1307 is absolute crap, its alright for a couple of days but looses 2 minutes a week!

The slightly more expensive DS3231 module has arrive so will give that a go... its pin-compatable too.

Also there seems to be flickering when at high brightness, particularly on the blue parts, will have to beef up the wiring.

After much playing about with the colourduinos ive decided to go for the neopixel 8x8 matrices, they are more expensive and have a less desirable pixel layout (not square and further apart) but a hell of a lot easier to actually do something useful with.

after a bit of coding, the rest was a breeze, arduino nano stuck on the back of the displays, RTC hooked up and an LDR too, basic code tying the LDR value to the global brightness control in FastLED library. Boom! Done!

OK, after a few pitfalls, i managed to get i2c working ok, had to increase the buffer from 32bytes to 192 in the library so i could send a modules-worth of data in one hit.

this shows a mega hooked up to the colorduino, it just generates random data and pushes it over i2c to the display. once the other colrduino turns up i will be able to daisychain them :-)

in the meantime ill be working on the details of constructing a frame of data on the master device. hope i have enough space, should have calculated that really :-/ ah well.

just creating this as a placeholder for when i actually start doing things with this... i have ordered a rainbowduino, 2 colorduinos, rtc and 4 8x8 led matricies. one colorduino has arrived, as have the matricies, and i have got a basic demo sketch working.

there seems to be very little out there for the colorduino, though many sites sell them. as a result, i will have to make my own i2c client sketch for it. we shall see how that goes :-)

hopefully get to try that tonight and even put a couple of piccies up.