Phillip's Clock Things

I built my first digital clock in the 1970s and it used the MM5314 chip. It was primitive but then at the end of last century I was teaching university students a topic called real-time systems and having them write a simple "interrupt driven clock" was a very nice introductory project. Things led to things.

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...

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, there is also this 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 ...