19 Dec 2016

Building a Digital Clock!

Hello everyone, and welcome back!

Recently I made something with my dad which I think is pretty cool. It is a digital clock. It actually shows time! Not the clock you make in second grade with two needles and numbers. Along with building the clock I learnt soldering. If you don’t already know what that is then I’ll tell you.

Soldering is just electrical glue between metals.  Just like that, soldering is when a electrically heated iron heats a thin stand of tin(a metal, not a tin can) or solder wire so that it becomes liquid and the melted tin is placed on metal so that as soon as the tin dries the metal is stuck to the other one.

Simple as that!

So for this I needed many parts:-

  1. A clock board
  2. A display
  3. An IC plus its holder
  4. A cup of tea (I’ll explain later)
  5. Nuts and Bolts
  6. Cases (colour doesn’t matter)
  7. A photo-reacting light
  8. Coin battery plus its holder
  9. Transistors
  10. Resistors

Tools:-

  1. My head
  2. Flux
  3. Soldering wire
  4. Soldering Iron

So I can’t fully explain how I made it because it had so many steps but I’ll try my best.

First thing I had to do is solder the display to the clock board. Speaking of soldering I forgot to mention that flux is used to make things easier. But even if you don’t want it easy (I can’t imagine how because it is in human nature to want things easy) still use flux. Flux = God. (Maybe not….) Anyway, after that I had to solder the cell holder onto the board. But the thing is that the people who made didn’t test it. So what happened is the holder’s soldering hole was directly under the display which was already soldered. So yeah there were quite a few problems like this but my dad and his friend were helping, so no big deal. After that the switches were soldered. There were only two switches. One for Mode and one for Set. There was also a little power jack so it can run using an AC plug. If the Plug isn’t able to provide power, the cell gives it backup power for some time. So it’s a bit like a UPS. The multimeter was used to check the resistance of the resistors.

Oh and the tea? The Tea did an amazing job of giving me a break, so it was the second most important thing.

[caption id=”attachment_638” align=”alignnone” width=”301”] Me soldering[/caption]

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I learnt a lot of things from this project:-

  • Soldering
  • How to use a multimeter
  • How to point at my clock while a pic is taken
  • How to well… Safety first!
  • And that tea is awesome!

So that’s all for now! Stay tuned for more!

Live Long and Prosper!