Edge Lit Word Clock Redux

Stunning… love this project!

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I gotta say I feel like this is just a failure waiting to happen. I don’t want to have to troubleshoot my router to figure out why my clock isn’t working.

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agree. i would not touch this approach.

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Is it really a timepiece? Or is it art?

Word clocks can be off by a few minutes, who would know? I skipped the RTC in mine, just to reduce costs. If it ever did lose time, I would

just unplug it and plug it back in again.

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Arduinos have wretched consistency when it comes to using something like millis(), and the limited number ranges mean that it rolls to zero every 49 days.

RTCs are super cheap (about $2 per or cheaper) so I throw them in. The ds3231 is even temp corrected, so it’s accurate to a couple of seconds per year.

On top of that the clock unit comes with 32kb of rom if you have something memory heavy.

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And generally that includes everything you need crystal, battery etc. Remember having to source all that to get the price down.

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… and using an off-the-shelf i2c clock unit makes it so easy to integrate into your code.

Unless I was making many copies of whatever project it is I wouldn’t even consider trying to source bare chips and roll my own.

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Yeah, These all in one devices are so easy now. It was such a pain to source the DS1307 then find a good quality crystal and all that. Even full GPS modules are super cheap now. I’ve been collecting so much to start teaching my Daughter all this stuff.

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Great write up. Super cool project.

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With ~ 200 clocks built and sold, i reached the scale where adding the 5 parts necessary for a RTC became cost effective a while back. parts = clock chip, one tiny cap, 2 resistors, and 1 crystal. I am down to my last 2 boards so I just ordered boards for another 150 boards and parts to build out the first 50.

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Are you getting the entire board fabricated with a pick in place and pre-soldered? Because for me the labor cost would be way too high for me to justify that much soldering.

I’m just too expensive. Spending $1.50 on the daughter board and then having only five points of soldering to add a socket to my board is a clear win in my case.

If I were using a pick and place fabrication shop to make custom boards to cut out all of the labor and give me a true plug and play control board that might start to make sense if I were making many of them… but I tend to sell kits and sidestep the entire labor problem.

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I have started looking into having more of the board stuffed at the fabricator but have not pulled the trigger. For now, my teenage son and his best friend provide plenty of low cost labor to get these stuffed as well as a source for some quality face time.

It would be tempting to find an off the shelf clock board and use that in place of raw components provided I could fine one where I was sure the supply was steady and the quality sufficient. As is, 16 solder joints for raw vs 4 or 5 solder joints for an off the shelf is not taxing me enough to make me want to sort that out.

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