Make An LED Clock Using Arduino

For this project you will need access to welding equipment and metal cutting tools. I used a horizontal bandsaw to cut all the tubes to their appropriate length and then used a MIG welder to weld them all together. I also incorporated a curved piece of 1/8″ bar to form a circle 30″ in diameter. This used a curler, but can be done without. The only other major tool I used was a soldering iron for the LEDs. Needlenose pliers, helper hands, and safety-wear go a long way to aid you though!

Materials:

• 120 tubes 3″ long (60 sec + 60 min) = 360″ of tubing = 30 feet of 1″ steel tubing (this is the hardest part to get just because you need so much)
• 24 tubes 2″ long (24 hours) = 48″ = 4 ft 3″ diameter tubing (I used a broken table support for this)
• 100-200 ft of as thin of wire as you can find (magnet wire is a good option). Also, try to get black wire to blend in better.
• 144 LEDs
  • 60 for the seconds (choose color A)
  • 60 for the minutes (choose color B)
  • 24 for the hours (choose color C)
• 24 resistors (100 ohms or close)
• Arduino MEGA (you could work to put it onto regular Arduino but we need 24 I/O pins in this build)
• DS 1307 (found here)

The metalwork, although tedious, is fairly simply (assuming you already know how to weld). I am not going to get into all the how-to-weld topics (there are plenty of other ibles and opportunities to learn this elsewhere)…

Here are the metal-work steps:

Step 1:     Cut the tubes. 

you need to cut 144 three-inch tubes (1″ diameter). I used a horizontal bandsaw with a block clamped down at the 3″ mark to cut as quickly as possibly. While this step takes the most time, it isn’t that challenging. I would not attempt this without a bandsaw or other power tool as there are a lot of cuts to make…

Step 2:     Bend a Circle

To create a guide for when it comes to welding the tubes together, we want to make a circle out of a bent piece of steel rod (1/8″ or 1/4″ thick) (1″ wide). The diameter of this circle is set to be 30″ so we need to first cut a length of 30″ x Pi = 94.25″. Then you need to bend or roll the flat length into the curved circle. This is most easily accomplished in a roller (as I did) or you can take the hard, long, and less precise way of just bending it slowly by hand. It isn’t too tough to bend, but it sure wont be as nicely bent as with a roller.

Step 3:     Welding

I prefer MIG welding always because it is fast and easy. You can choose whatever welding method / technique you like though. Basically we are just going to make a ton of spot welds. Nothing heavy duty is needed (although you can heavily weld a couple if you want to hang it by them).

With that said, remember your safety!

I found it easiest to start with the minute’s tubes. I welded all 60 tubes to the inside of the guide circle bar. Then you can choose to either do the seconds or the hours. I did seconds next, and lastly the hour tubes. For aesthetics, I spot welded (although I think I used an oxy-acetylene torch) a few small rods to the inside. They are completely not needed. The original idea was to mount the Arduino to the center but I realized this would look ugly so I stuffed it at the bottom.

(it wouldn’t be a bad idea to clean the metal off and de-burr it)

The circuit is based off of charlieplexing. The circuit is best shown in the pictures… which are basically my drawings on a white-board. Each set of time (hours, minutes, seconds) have their own set of pins (no crossover). 6 pins for the hours, 9 for the minutes, and 9 for the seconds. 24 total.

The third picture basically is just me calculating how much space (as in the angle) each 1″ tube takes up and thus what radius circle do I need to hold all the tubes. I also accounted for a little bit of spacing as well. This is how I came up with the 30″ diameter.

The hour circuit is shown in the second picture. As you can see, the LEDs marked 1-24 are in use and the additional 6 LEDs (25-30) are not in use (there isn’t physically anything in their position). The 6 pins shown on the right of picture 2 are the 6 pins needed from the Arduino. These 6 pins control all 24 LEDs for the hour hand.

The chart at the top (in green) on the first picture shows the number of pins needed to control X LEDs using simple charlieplexing. As you can see, n pins can control (n² – n) LEDs. So to control 24 LEDs we need 6 pins (as claimed earlier) and to control 60 LEDs we need 9 pins.

ignore some of the unnecessary info in green… and ignore the purple and blue… basically, we need 24 pins from the Arduino (or whatever). This means we can’t use an UNO or Due, rather, we need to use the larger Arduino MEGA which comes with 54 pins. It is a shame to waste all those extra pins, but so be it. You could also use an atmega or anything else, the code is fairly simple.

You will also need a DS1307 Real-time clock (as shown at adafruit) if you want the clock to remember the time after turning it off each time. Otherwise you have to manually set the time every time you start it running. This would mean going into the code each time.

The same circuit can be extended from to 6-pin version to the 9-pin version. The hard part comes with the physical wiring… I would recommend starting with the hour’s wiring to get the rhythm before continuing to the more complicated rings.