Phillip's Clock Things

Current Clocks

• ClockThing2: please see these NTP Clock Notes.
• ClockThing3: please look in the ClockThing3 cloud storage area for the User Guide (a pdf file); please read Clock Thing 3 Software Update Notes if you need to update software.

History

I built my first digital clocks based on ICs like the National Semiconductor MM5314 CMOS chip (see this Elektor MOS Clock Design of 1974) and the Cal-Tex CT7001 PMOS chip (see this data sheet with a sample circuit). It was fun, it was somewhat primitive and simple (yes it was the 1970s) ... but it did show how IC devices reduced parts counts and complexity. Many years later, I was teaching real time systems at RMIT and one aspect of this was to have students develop systems that responded to external events like button presses or timer alarms. One introductory lab exercise was to write a simple "interrupt driven clock" and that led to things such as ClockThing2.

1999 ➔ A simple 4 digit clock assignment was used by RMIT EE and ME students learning how to program smaller processor chips with names like "Atmel AVR", and driving a small 16x2 LCD as the main display. These Atmel AVR devices had very good C language support (which helped lead to the Arduino effort) but I digress... the AVR device with its onboard crystal oscillator was essentially ClockThing1.

2014 ➔ ClockThing2 was developed using a small processor module (with built in WiFi) called the "Espressif ESP8266", and it used 7-segment digital displays and later LED dot-matrix displays (like we see on some billboards). It can use an internet time reference or it can also use a GPS satellite receiver as a time reference. Documents: Phillip's Clock Thing v2.7.pdf, NTP Clock Overview.

2024 ➔ ClockThing3 was developed using a processor module called the "Espressif ESP32-S3" with an LCD screen. Documents: PhillipsClockThing3_v2.pdf.

2025 ➔ ClockThing4 is an experiment using a new small processor (RTL8720DN-bw16) which contains support for dual-band WiFi ...