Design And Construction Of A Digital Clock With Calendar

This project is aimed at explaining the Design and construction of a digital wall clock with calendar. It give report on how we can achieve this aim and the primary objective of this work is to bring a vibrant digital clock display to everyone located within the vicinity where the clock is being installed, and the importance of clock is to tell time and date, so you can meet up with events and assignments, these are just few importance of CLOCK. In developing countries, time is a very important element of life, maximizing it will give you a better achievement. We shall discuss on how you can design one in this report with a well narrated literature review for better understandings.

          Also efforts were made in explaining the vital and important part of the design components and their functions in the project.

TABLE OF CONTENT

Title Page                                                                                          i

Certification                                                                                                ii

Dedication                                                                                         iii

Acknowledgement                                                                             iv

Abstract                                                                                            v

Table of Contents                                                                                       vi

List of Table                                                                                      vii

List of Figure                                                                                    viii

CHAPTER ONE

1.0         INTRODUCTION                                                              1

1.1         BRIEF DISCUSSION ON CLOCK                                    2

• AIM 2
• OBJECTIVES 2
• UNITS OF THE SYSTEM 3

1.3.1      HARDWARE PART                                                                   3

• SOFTWARE PART 3

CHAPTER TWO

• LITERATURE REVIEW 6

2.1         HARDWARE COMPONENTS                                         9

• STAGES IN THE EMBEDDED DIGITAL CLOCK WITH

CALENDAR                                                                      9

• POWER SUPPLY UNIT 9

2.2.2      THE LOGIC UNIT                                                             10

2.2.3      PROGRAM SECTIONS                                                    11

2.2.        CONTROL UNIT                                                               15

CHAPTER THREE

3.0         DESIGN ANALYSIS, AND CALCULATIONS                16

3.4         PROGRAMMING THE MICROCONTROLLER             22

 CHAPTER FOUR

4.0         THE CONSTRUCTION                                                     24

4.1         IMPLEMENTATION                                                                  25

4.1.1      COMPONENTS                                                                 25

4.1.2      COMPONENT TESTING                                                  25

4.1.3      ASSEMBLING OF COMPONENTS ON BREADBOARD        26

4.2         POWER SUPPLY UNIT

4.3         THE SYSTEM OPERATION                                            27

4.3.1      CONTROLS                                                                       27

CHAPTER FIVE

5.0         CONCLUSION                                                                  29

5.1         RECOMMENDATIONS                                                    30

REFERENCES                                                                            31

APPENDIX                                                                        32 

LIST OF TABLE

Table                   Title                                                                     Pages 

TABLE: 2.2.3      CONVERTING DIGITS TO SEVEN SEGMENT DISPLAY BITS                                                 13

TABLE 4.2:         VOLTAGE REGULATOR TEST RESULT                  27

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure                  Title                                                                     Pages 

FIG.1.0       THE PIC16F877 INTERNAL STRUCTURE                1

FIG 2.0       BLOCK DIAGRAM OF A DIGITAL CLOCK

WITH CALENDAR DISPLAY                                     8

FIG. 2.2.1   POWER SUPPLY UNIT                                                         10

FIG. 2.2.2   MICROCONTROLLER UNIT                                                11

FIG2.2.3     SEVEN SEGMENT DISPLAY                                               12

FIG 2.2.4a MASKING OF SEVEN SEGMENT DISPLAY            14

FIG 2.2.4b  SCANNING AND MULTIPLEXING OF SEVEN

SEGMENT DISPLAY                                                   14

FIG 3.0       BLOCKS DIAGRAM OF THE STAGES IN DIGITAL

CLOCK WITH CALENDAR                                        16

FIG 3.1       CIRCUIT DIAGRAM OF MCU CONFIGURATION

WITH LED DISPLAY                                                   16

FIG 3.2       EXTERNAL OSCILLATOR IN RC MODE                           20

FIG. 3.3      RC OSCILLATOR                                                        21

FIG 3.4       PROGRAMMING THE PIC                                         22

FIG 4.1.3    TESTING THE DISPLAY UNIT SEGMENTS             26

FIG 4.0       CIRCUIT DIAGRAM OF DIGITAL CLOCK

WITH CALENDAR                                                      28 

CHAPTER ONE

1.0     INTRODUCTION

This project is a design and construction of a digital clock with calendar. The core component is the microcontroller PIC16f877. This device employs sequential circuit components. It consists of LED, seven segment display, transistor, voltage regulator, resistors and capacitor.

FIG.1.0 THE PIC16F877 INTERNAL STRUCTURE 

1.1     BRIEF DISCUSSION ON CLOCK

A clock is an instrument to indicate, keep, and coordinate time. Today a clock “refers to any device for measuring and displaying the time”. The clock is one of the oldest human inventions, meeting the need to consistently measure interval of time shorter than the natural unit, the day, the month and the year. Devices operating on several physical processes have been used over the millennia.

A digital clock is a type of clock that displays the time digitally (i.e.  In numerals or other symbols), as opposed to an analog clock, where the time is indicated by the positions of rotating hands.

This clock counts seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and
years. Time and calendar is displayed on four separate seven segment LED displays, and is adjustable with three buttons at start time (up, down, set).
You can program the day of the week, hour and minute, day of the month and year.

• AIM

The aim of this project is to design and construct a digital clock with yearly calendar.

• OBJECTIVES
• To be able to understand the principle behind digital system display.
• To be able to interface micro controller with the display unit.
• To be able to display the date and time in digital format.
• UNITS OF THE SYSTEM

This digital clock with calendar model can be divided into two parts, the hardware and software. The hardware can be divided into several sections. This includes the power supply unit, the control unit and the display unit.

The software part can be broken down into the following sections. This includes the timing and counting unit, display decoder and scanning unit

1.3.1  HARDWARE PART

• Power supply unit;

Power supply unit consist of transformer, bridge rectifier, filter capacitor, voltage regulator and back up battery.

• The control unit;

The control unit consists of a microcontroller, the PIC16F877. It controls by timing, counting and sending numeric code to be displayed to the seven segment display.

• The display unit;

The display is made up of ten seven segment displays, and ten NPN BJT transistors.

• SOFTWARE PART

• Timing unit;

The timing of the clock is achieved by assigning timer0 a special function registers in the microcontroller to timing.  Timer0 is incremented at every four clock cycle of the microcontroller, when it runs to the end it causes interrupt that enables a general purpose registers to increment. When this registers count to a reference value, register linked to the seconds is increased.  Timing starts with this register (seconds) which serves as input to other registers associated with other parts of the clock.

• Counting unit;

Each unit of the clock is linked to a general purpose register for counting purposes. There is a routine program that handles counting up for each of the clock units (refer to appendix for codes of routine program). The time taken for each increase is determined in the routine handling it. The output of each counter is binary and therefore needs to be converted to seven segment display format. Another routine is program to handle this (refer to appendix for routine program).

• Display decoder;

The display decoder is a program that converts binary coded decimal output of the counter to seven segment display format. The output of each counter is converted to numeric display equivalent using this decoder.

• Scanning unit;

In this project, the required number of terminals required can be estimated as follows;

Each 7 segment requires at least 7pins of the MCU, there are ten 7 segments in the circuit, therefore required pins of the MCU is 7 * 10 = 70 pins. Other pins required for proper functioning of the MCU are the 4 power supply pins, 2 oscillator pins, 1 MCLR pin making the total number of pins required = 70 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 77pins. The MCU has just 40pins and not all these pins are available, therefore there is need for the LEDs and the seven segments to be multiplexed (discussed in the next chapter). There is a routine that handles this part of the display in the program (refer to appendix).