Emil's Projects & Reviews

OpenHardware & OpenSource

RGB Matrix Clock 9th August 2014

This is an example of over-engineering: a clock with 4 microcontrollers! Three of these are ATmega368 which are part of a cheap development board the Colorduino. Each of these controls one third of the display namely one 8×8 RGB LED matrix. The synchronization and communication between these 4 microcontrollers will happen via a multi-master I2C bus. So far I've finished the case and I've written a simulator in GTK of the various display modes which you may download bellow.

Clock simulator
Linux versionWindows version
and GTK runtime
DXF
design file (QCAD)

Here is the Colorduino schematic of one Colorduino module.

The RGB clock schematic and Gerber files.

Main PCB
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Tags: arduino, avr, clock, i2c, rgb.

Comments On This Entry

Daniel Fernandes Submitted at 20:55:05 on 10 July 2018
Are these Colorduino controlled by Arduino I2C? I did not understand! Is it possible to share the code? Thank you
Emil Submitted at 14:14:09 on 15 July 2018
The Colorduino's are slaves on the I2C bus. They react to commands from the STMF32103 chip which is responsible for keeping the time and generating the graphics.

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