Skip to content

Electronic

Jump to bottom
ccachin edited this page Apr 20, 2018 · 25 revisions

LED Wiring

Put two rigid 1.5mm2 wires on the left and right side and connect Dout and Din as below: It's the most tricky part. Make solder bridge between the rigid wire and the strip pattern.

You can find a smart alternative for wiring here:

hardware/box/Alternative Frame & pcb ledtstrip/pcb_ledstrip/

PCB Description

The PCB has been designed to easily connect the various components that make the word clock displays the time in words.

To make it more "flexible", it is possible to add other components, check the Upgrade section to see other functionnalities.

The only mandatory components to display beautiful words on your clock are:

  • 1x Arduino Nano
  • 1x Capacitor 1mF - 25V
  • 1x Resettable fuse
  • 1x RTC DS3231
  • 1x Rotary encoder
  • 1x resistor 500 ohms - 2W
  • 144 LEDS (leds strip)
  • Connectors (optional)

Upgrade

As mentioned above, this PCB is flexible. Several options are available to improve the behavior of your Wordclock.

Auto Brightness

You can add a photo resistor on place "sensor". After activating the feature in the software, your clock will set the LED's brightness automatically.

The components are:

  • 1x Photo resistor
  • 1x Resistor 10k ohms - 1/4W Connect the components as following:

IOT

If you want to connect your word clock on WiFi, you can add a ESP8266 to manage the communication between your network and the Arduino.

You can for example get internet time, display temperature, weather, all datas from the world wide network.

Note: If you want to get internet time, you can of course remove the RTC module.

The essential components for Wifi:

  • 1x ESP8266-01
  • 1x voltage regulator 3.3 Volts (smd) <- 3.3V is mandatory for ESP. It really doesn't like 5 Volts!
  • 1x MOS FET BS170
  • 2x Resistor 10k ohms - 1/2W
  • 1x Resistor 4k7 ohms - 1/4W
  • Pin header 3x2
  • 2x Jumpers
  • 1x Capacitor 10uF
  • 1x Capacitor 47uF

The two capacitors provide a stable wireless connection.

RX/TX pins must be bridged. To program the ESP, put a jumper on SET. Your Arduino as to be set on programmer mode.

Otherwise, mount the ESP on female pin header and make a solder bridge on RX and TX. Then you have to programm your ESP separately.

More devices

An I2C bus is available on the PCB, this allows you to add all the sensors or I2C devices you wish.

The components to add are:

  • 2x resistors 4k7 ohms - 1/4W

Extend memory

Your programm can be maybe to big for the Arduino memory. You have the possibility to add a hardware memory (I2C EEPROM), you can add it here:

Clone this wiki locally