Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

Home Arduino project: Digital Clock

Arduino project: Digital Clock

Tweet

by Darren Yates March 14, 2014

Arduino is the worlds favourite microcontroller board and despite its low 16MHz/8-bit computing
power, it can drive robots, connect to Twitter and even power 3D printers and quadcopters.
One of the many reasons for its success is the number of expansion boards or shields available.
Weve already looked at a few including the W5100 Ethernet Shield, along with two motor drive
shields one for DC motors (used in our Rolly Robot project and free-roaming Attacknid hack)
and one for servo motors (powering our Stompy walking robot project). But its the ability to
make Arduino handle human interaction that makes it so versatile.
Weve already looked at how you can connect your Arduino to your TV showing weather
information and playing Space Invaders, but there is a low-cost shield that can display data in a
far more compact way.

The 1602 LCD Shield

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

One of the most popular shields is the 1602 LCD Shield. You can find clones of these
everywhere on eBay selling for as little as $6 and that includes shipping. The shield itself delivers a smaller daughterboard containing an alphanumeric LCD panel consisting of two lines
with 16 characters per line, typically driven by the popular Hitachi HD44780 LCD controller. Throw in five user-programmable push-button switches plus on-board master reset button and
you have the 1602 LCD Shield.

The shields rear has no components so it cant short against the Arduino board.

These little 162 LCD panels have been around for over 20 years I created a simple project in Silicon Chip magazine back in 1993 that connected one to a PCs parallel printer port.
But its only with the introduction of Arduino that theyve become so ridiculously cheap. And by integrating the LCD panel into a shield, theres no soldering involved you just slot it into
place using the Arduinos Shield header pins.
The LCD panel is backlit, lighting as soon as power is applied, but it can be turned off by programming. While green-backlit panels are common, theres a growing number of blue-backlit
options as well. The six push-button switches are located on the bottom left side with four in a plus-pad arrangement, the outer switch on the left designated as Select and a master-reset
button on the far right. Press the reset button and your sketch will restart. You can adjust the LCD contrast by the small potentiometer (or pot for short) at the top-left. Adjust it so the blank
pixels are just beginning to darken and back it off a little. There are many different brands of 1602 Shield on the market but they all conform to this basic layout.
So not only do you have a compact display device but you can also handle user feedback, which makes this shield an ideal project companion to any compatible Arduino microcontroller
board.

Applications
Again, this is one of those shields whose applications are only limited by your imagination. Normally when demonstrating something for the first time, you do the equivalent of Hello, world
program or sketch, but to show you how the interaction works, we decided to go a bit further by creating our own simple digital clock. Weve taken our clock the extra step by 3D printing a
case designed for this particular shield, complete with push-button actuators.

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

The push-buttons allow for user feedback, but only use one analog input.

Programming the Shield

As usual, were making the sketch available on our web site for this project and youll find it over at apcmag.com/arduino.htm. Copy the contents of the /libraries folder to the /arduino 1.0.5/libraries folder, launch the Arduino IDE and load the sketch file.
There are a few things going on in this sketch but heres the overview basically we need to display initial information on the LCD panel, handle input via the shield buttons and
accurately updating the time display once every second.

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

The tiny 10kohm potentiometer (pot) sets the LCD screen contrast.

Libraries
The 1602 LCD Shield relies on two specific software libraries LiquidCrystal and LCDKeypad. The very first thing you have to do is initial the LCD Shield so that the Arduino
microcontroller knows what youre playing with. And its here you may find initial problems. While there are many different 1602 Shield clones available, not all use the same pin
configuration, so the LiquidCrystal library is designed to allow you to set it to your specific shield. You can read about it at arduino.cc/en/Reference/LiquidCrystal. Keeping it short, virtually
all 162 LCD panels can run over a 4-bit data bus with two extra control pins RS (register select) and EN (enable).
If you purchase the super-cheap $6 DFRobot shield (like we did), youll probably find that using pin D8 for RS and pin D9 for EN, along with D4-D7 for the four-bit data bus pins should
work. This is outlined in the code line:
LiquidCrystal lcd(8,9,4,5,6,7);

Once thats done, displaying text on the panel is as simple as setting to cursor position using the setCursor command and printing your text through the print command like this:
lcd.setCursor(0,0);
lcd.print(Darrens little);
lcd.setCursor(3,1);
lcd.print(digital clock);

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

The cursor position is set by (char, row) with each dimension starting with zero, meaning the top line is row 0 and the bottom line row 1. There are numerous other functions available as
well.

Programming push-buttons
One of the more unusual aspects of this shield is how the buttons are electrically connected to the Arduino. Push-button switches are essentially digital in their actuation theyre either
on or off. However, with five input switches, you could potentially tie up five digital input/output (I/O) lines to handle them. But instead, the switches are all connected to just one of the
analog inputs. When you push one of the buttons, it sets up a specific voltage on the analog input through a resistor network.
Using DFRobots LCDkeypad library, you can check for these inputs to know which button was pressed and perform an appropriate action. Its a little awkward in how it works but using
one input rather than five leaves you more I/O lines for your project. The five analog values are stored in a one-dimension array at the start of the sketch:
int adc_key_val[5] ={ 50, 200, 400, 600, 800 };

We incorporated a common routine used to check the input value to see which button was pressed.

How do you code a clock?

Your PC, notebook, tablet and smartphone all have clock apps built into their operating systems. In fact, clocks are such an important part of where computing meets the real world that
special electronic modules called real time clocks (RTCs) have been invented with the express job of simply keeping the time.
When you want a software program to create a change in some real-world hardware at a particular event, such as a push-button being pressed, you generate whats called an interrupt. As
its name suggests, its job is to interrupt the main flow of the software to launch a specific function. Depending on the microcontroller (or CPU), interrupts can be triggered by hardware (a
specific input for example) or software.
Our clock keeps track of the year, month, day, date, hour, minutes and seconds. Since the second counter is the smallest unit we need to update, well need to ensure it gets updated
each second. We dont have an RTC at our disposal so to create the interrupt, we use the TimedAction library like this:
TimedAction timer = TimedAction(1000,clockUpdate);

This library allows you to create a repeating interrupt trigger at a program-defined time interval that runs a procedure or function. We use this library to create a repeating interrupt once per
second (1000 milliseconds). Each time it triggers, we run the clockUpdate code function that increments the seconds counter and takes care of the rollover for each new minute, hour,
day, date, month and year.

Setting the time

In normal operation, a clock doesnt have to interact with the outside world except when youre setting the time to begin with. In one way, weve taken a fairly basic approach to time
setting you do this as soon as you power up the Arduino clock through a series of questions you answer for each of the time intervals year, month, day, date, hour, minute using
the Up, Down and Select buttons to set each option. Once you press the Select button, you move onto the next setting. After pressing it the final time, the clock sketch goes into the time
function loop and updates every second.

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

Setting the time is as simple as using the Up, Down and Select buttons.

However, the backroom code automatically sets the correct options for each time interval for example, you set the month by selecting from January, February and so on; days from
Sunday, Monday etc. Once you set the month, you can choose the correct day, which means the code knows that January has 31 days; April has 30, and so on. You cant select April 31
for example. It also knows the difference between AM and PM and that there can only be 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. We do this using a series of two-dimensional
character arrays like this:
char day[7][10] = { Sunday ,Monday ,Tuesday ,Wednesday,Thursday ,Friday ,Saturday };

Here, were setting up the day options the array has seven elements, each with 10 characters. Because of the way Arduino works, you must fill the array characters explicitly, which is
the reason for the blank spaces in the smaller day names. If you dont, your sketch wont compile for you.
So overall, this is a more complex example of allowing a choice from a limited number of options and varying the options for subsequent input based on previous selections.
What our sketch doesnt do is take into account leap years well leave that as an exercise for you to do. It also doesnt allow for time modification after the initial setup. To do that, you
have to hit the Reset button and start again.
Remember, the idea here is to show off the LCD Shield as well as show how to code for it into your apps. The rest is up to you.

3D printed case
To finish off our clock, weve had a look on Thingiverse.com and not surprisingly, there are dozens of brackets and cases designed for various members of the Arduino family. We were
expecting to have to buy a small general-purpose ABS plastic Jiffy box from Jaycar Electronics to put our clock in, but someone has designed a case specifically to use this Arduino/Shield
combo, so we printed it out on our Printrbot Jr 3D printer. You can check out the case at www.thingiverse.com/thing:132497.

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

Installation
You dont need to screw the Arduino/Shield combo into place in the case it will sit in position on its own once the two shell halves come together. The only thing you need to be careful of
is the two retention clips. These can break so dont press the clips press on shell either side of the clips to compress it so the clips will lock into the base. Make sure the button actuators
move cleanly inside their holes too, otherwise, theyll jam up the switches. Use a small wood file to open the holes as necessary just not too much or the actuators will fall out.

The shield slots into the Arduino Uno board, overhanging on one end only.

Power
The clock consumes little power so you can either grab a simple 5VDC/200mA power brick with the right 2.1mm DC plug or you can get a cheap USB phone charger and power the clock
through the USB port. Either way will work just fine.

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

The clock can be powered by USB cable or DC power adapter.

Modification ideas
The sketch code for this clock we threw together in a day is more a demonstration of how the 1602 Shield works. But if you want to modify it, go right ahead. Improvements we can think of
straight away are:

a simpler time-adjustment system without resetting

battery backup
automatic backlight dimming
programmable alarm with snooze
FM radio
Sure, you can buy a clock radio that does all of this but wheres the fun in that? We dont care what anyone says the best way to learn is by doing and theres plenty of scope for
exploring ideas in this project. For example, you could use the Arduino to control another device via a user-settable alarm time it could be your bed-side lamp or your coffee maker.
Thats well beyond the entry-level hobbyist but it just takes a spark of imagination to come up with your own ideas.

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

Our digital clock inside a 3D printed case designed for this shield.

Search Site

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Search

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

Follow us

Recent Comments
Darren Yates on Arduino Masterclass
Part 4: Build a mini robot
Darren Yates on Arduino Project 5:
Digital audio player
http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

HarryDGrif on Best iPhone and iPad

apps, February 2014
SicaBixby on The best PC gaming
accessories: 8 gaming keyboards
reviewed and rated
Raquib Buksh on Arduino Masterclass
Part 4: Build a mini robot

About APC Magazine

Whats inside APC this month
APC team
Advertise with us
Contact Us

Magazine Resource
APC Tutorial Files
Arduino Source Codes

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

Tweets by @APCmag

This week's Poll

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]

Arduino project: Digital Clock - APC

How long since you last bought a PC?

I upgraded this week!

The past few months
My PC is around a year old now
Really, it's been over a year? Where
did that time go?
My 386 is still going strong...

Vote
View Results Polldaddy.com

Top

Future is AOP & PPA Digital Publisher of the Year and BMA Media Company of the Year.
This siteis part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. We produce content across five core areas:

About Future

Jobs

PR

Advertising

Digital Future

Privacy Policy

Cookies Policy

Terms & Conditions

Subscriptions

Investor Relations

Contact Future

Future Publishing (Overseas) Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath BA1 2BW. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 06202940. Australian Office: Suite 3, Level 10, 100 Walker Street, North Sydney, NSW
2060 T: +61 2 9955 2677

http://apcmag.com/arduino-project-digital-clock.htm[31/03/2014 11:14:22 AM]