To my dissapointment, I found out other people have already gotten to this idea before I have Yet I still want to make my own.
So...pretty much the title says all.
Make a circuit with a bunch of LEDs, each for each hour number and minute number and the numbers will change accordingly lyk a clock.

Now, what I'm having trouble with is creating a clock generator for the minute counter.

Would a 60kohm resistor and a 1mF capacitor generate the desired pulse?

I understand the seperate components just not in terms of pulse generation.

thanks,
pnb

 

You don't say where the 60k and 1uF are used but if these are the timing components for a 555, it won't make a very accurate clock.

Usually, you would would start with a 1 second timebase (derived from a 32.768 kHz crystal followed by 15 binary dividers) which would then trigger a succession of cascaded of binary counters whereby as one counter rolls over it increments the next. e.g. when the seconds counter rolls from 59 to 00 it increments the minutes counter.

 

Do you have any idea if microcontrollers? because using micros is very simple to make, otherwise, you need a biiiiiiggggg board with many ic's. It will work of course one way or another

 

I guess the first thing to put out there is that I'm a true beginner. I recently took an Introduction to Electrical Engineering course at Carnegie Mellon University and got really interested in Electrical Engineering, which is why I want to make things for fun.

Therefore I do not know where the resistor and capacitor go.

In the class we needed to make a clock generator so that the robot (that we built in lab) would go through each instruction at every pulse. For the clock we used a couple of resistors, a capacitor and a few inverters. I figured the basic idea was simple the charging and discharging property of a capacitor.


Secondly, the capacitor charge i said was 1mF, which probably has no relevancy but just making sure you did not misread it.


Lastly, I was going to increment the hours numbers when the minutes goes from 59 to 00, but I just do not know how I can give a pulse for the minutes to increment.

So, how do I make a circuit that pulses every minute, so that the minutes counter increments every minute?

Thanks,
pnb

 

@kammenos - do you have any links to making them? I sorta know what they are, very vaguely but I would not mind learning. I really don't mind doing it either way, I would rather do it the easier way and get some experience but if micros are fairly simple...then why not?

 

Check this site out, it has been done very well.

The site seems to be down at the moment, but here's the link...

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Bill_Bowden/homepage.htm