Binary Clock…
Looks interesting doesn’t it? Well, I thought so as well and decided to make one. My loyal readers and friends would know by now, that I am too lazy to make my own design, so I started hunting for tutorials and found a great one on GIMP FAQ.
The site features a very good tutorial about building a binary clock. Anyone with a good electronics knowledge would know that the design featured on the site is a very simple clock.
It first re-samples the A/C supply either 50Hz or 60Hz into a 1Hz signal. Then this signal drives a combo of 2 decimal counters with the second being converted to mod 6 counter. Meaning that the total stages of the combo are 60. So the combo resets every 60 seconds, or one minute.
Using this, the next combo is driven and then the third one with this. The third set is a 24 state counter combo that resets the all 3 combos when it finishes the cycle.
Having said that much, the design also features a push button time setting control. The problem I faced was that, the circuit is big. It meant that the PCB layout design would be a real pain in the a**. Still I went ahead and created a layout with some custom and some automatic (AI) layout program. The result was that the board had to be a minimum 2 layer one or must have many wires.
This was annoying, so I decided to go ahead with a concept similar to procedure oriented programming (POP). I decided to split the PCB in parts of the circuit. With that idea in mind, I have created a layout for the first part of the circuit. It is the 5V power supply and clock to the counters. The circuit diagram and the layout diagrams are shown below.
PCB Layout, Transfer
PCB Layout, Actual
I have created the layout all by myself, no AI used at all. Any suggestions are welcome.
This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 12:07 am and is filed under Design, Electronics, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
