Software user

By popular demand, I added time setting capabilities to BookClock . Time and date can now be set from two buttons, called "Menu" ("H/M" in the photo) and "Plus" ("+"). Press "Menu" to select between hours and minutes. Press "Plus" to increment the blinking selection. When done, just let it time out (about 4 seconds) and the time will be saved in the RTC. Hold down "Menu" until the date, formatted as yy/mm/dd, is displayed. Press "Menu" again to select either year, month or day, then press "Plus" to increment the blinking value. The time-setting code is copied and adapted from IllyClock and uses the same state-machine mechanism. I connected the two buttons to D16 ("Plus") and D17 ("Menu"). The code, compilable on both Arduino 23 and 1.0, can be downloaded from here .

As promised , I am returning with the sketch ( download from here ). Justin and Wyolum Co. also promised (wink, wink) that the next revision of I2SD will have the needed digital pins accessible through headers. This "mixed breed wise clock" is using the I2SD (with on-board RTC and SD card), the display (and idea) from Book Clock , and code borrowed and adapted from Wise Clock 2 . Missing are the user buttons and a tilt switch, which may be connected to the free A0/D15 - A3/D18 pins available on the header of the  I2SD board. ( Note: The buttons and the tilt switch should be also supported in software as well, code which can be copied from the existing Wise Clock 2 and Book Clock sketches . )

Many people are building stuff using the 3208 LED display from Sure, based on projects I have shown here (e.g. BookClock ). The test code I published doesn't work "out of the box" with these newer displays. So they ask the question: why? Here is the answer. The "older" 0832 LED display uses the HT1632 chip. The "newer" 3208 (which comes with either 3mm or 5mm LEDs) uses the slightly different HT1632C chip. (Note that HT1632C chip is also used in the bi-color 3216 displays .) The difference between these two chips, from the software perspective, is in the initialization procedure. Here is part of the ht1632_setup() function for the 0832 display (with HT1632 ):   ht1632_sendcmd(HT1632_CMD_SYSDIS);  // Disable system   ht1632_sendcmd(HT1632_CMD_COMS10);  // PMOS drivers   ht1632_sendcmd(HT1632_CMD_MSTMD); // Master Mode   ht1632_sendcmd(HT1632_CMD_SYSON); // System on   ht1632_sendcmd(HT1632_CMD_LEDON); // LEDs on And here is the simila...