Myself and a couple friends who were on team 4976 last year, built this countdown display for build season. It’s a live countdown of the weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds left until bag and tag.
It runs off the same microcontroller as the Arduino Uno, along with a real time clock and 4, 16-channel constant current LED drivers. Here’s a quick video explaining how it works:
If anyone’s interested in building something similar, I can provide schematics, PCB layouts, CAD models, and the code for running this one.
We’ve got the LEDs, drivers, a power supply, and an arduino. I’ve even got some RTC modules once we get far enough. It’s literally the same size and general idea you’ve got going. I’ve been having fun sharing this with a couple of my fellow mentors… they were giving me crap about wanting to make one earlier in the pre-season.
I’d recommend the DS1307 RTC if you’ve got that one. Really easy to use over I2C and it supports a backup battery, and has a settable 1Hz output pin that you can use to tell the microcontroller to update the display. I’d be happy to provide any documentation from our build if you want help getting started!
I’d be interested in some more info about this, although honestly, I probably won’t ever get around to making one - maybe some aspiring students on our team will end up working on this.
Yeah, but during build, it’s a countdown TO freedom.
Looks awesome. That would be cool at our shop.
EDIT: Also, why did you etch your own boards? There are so many places to get cheap boards done these days (though perhaps they’re not so cheap in Canada).
