New Project: HD Clock - Intro

So this week, I got DirecTV installed and I finally got rid of Comcast.  Were i live, the Comcast service is a joke and I'm paying a lot for their HD service that doesn't include much.  DirecTV on the other hand gives me a ton of HD and for the first year, I'm saving like $20 a month on my bill which includes all the movie channels.  Just in time for "Game of Thrones" Next month on HBO! (OMG!!!)  Well, one of the downsides is that my girl and I had really got used to seeing the time displayed on our Comcast receivers and the new DirecTV ones don't display the time, which ended up being very annoying.  The only other clocks in the house are our phones, our computers, or the clock on the stove in the kitchen.  This got me thinking as to what i could do with my Arduino to display the time.  My first though was, "Hell yes, a reason to do the Nixie Clock!" but my Girl told me i was on a tight budget for this project and i was all <sadface>.

So I've got $20 ish to spend on making each clock I need so I headed on over to Sparkfun.com.  Originally I planned on taking a look at LED matrix's to see what i could do with that.

My first though was to use a LOLshield since the led's were individually addressable and it fits right over a Arduino.  But as I was looking around sparkfun, i found these guys:

                                
They are a led matrix built into one common cathode housing that I think look awesome.  The tricolor one was bigger and a lot more expensive then the red and green version so as much as i'd like to get the tricolor it was out of my price range.  So i started looking up code for a LED clock.  In my search, i found this:

Its a Pong Clock using a version of the Arduino with the Real Time clock chip built in.  Each side looses on purpose as the time changes.  Hell yes!  A clock and a nod to my gamer roots, what more could you want?  So i dug up a version of the instructions and was dismayed to see how much I needed to get.  Because there were so many LED's to activate, i needed either a larger micro controller like the Arduino Mega or a bunch of stuff that was going to raise the roof on the price well outside my budget.  Poop.  So i dug around some more and was intreged to find these little gems.

The one of the left, the creator calls a Strobeshnik Digital Clock and it involves etching out numbers on a hard drive platter and spinning the disk so fast that the blinking led's underneath only turn on when the right number is over top them.  This happens faster that the human eye cant perceive and you see the correct time. That sounded awesome but the engraving part was something out of my area of expertise (note: my boss, Van, does metal engraving.  See what he might be able to do.).  The one on the right however uses a RGB led strip around the outside of the disc area and a notch, dremeled out of the platter which, because of the same high frequency blinking leds, show an Analog style clock with Hour, Minuit, and Second hands.  Now that sounded like something i could do and on the cheap since i have a huge stack of old dead drives at work.  Plus the parts required were dirt compared to everything else i saw.  I got enough parts to make three of these guys for $30, minus the Arduino controllers (forgot them this order), and two day shipping.  Right in budget!  Find a quiet enough drive in my stack and huzzah! heres our new clock.  Im going to be following the instructions from this Instructables documentation and documenting my success's and failures.  Once i get things the way I like, I plan on getting a few Arduino Mini Pro's  and work on packaging up this guy real nice like.  Thats it for now, I'll post again once i get the parts I need and can start working on this guy.  Later!