Arduino RGB Clock

     I was thinking about making an LED clock with an arduino. So, I was wondering what would make my clock stand out from the rest of the arduino LED clocks projects that are already out there.
     I was remembering an RGB cube I built. I then said that I would set out to make this an RGB clock.
     First, I setup a 4-digit seven segment display and got the clock code working. Then I was wondering if I could get a temp/humidty module to work with this also. I started with setting this up and ran into hurdle after hurdle.
     I stumbled upon some code that was very simular to what I wanted. This code display the temp, then the humidity, then the time. Well, that code didn't really work, but I did some tweaking and tuning and got it to work.
     Now that I had a working clock with temp and humidity, it was time to make a display to the size I was imagining.
     I found a 3x5 dot matrix frame to hold 5mm LEDs in a clock digit arraingment. This was perfect. I whipped up this frame on the 3D printer and started stuffing it with the commom cathode RGB LEDs. I then soldered all of the cathodes for each digit separately.
     Then I was on the tedious part of soldering all of the leads of the first digit to the second digit, then from the second digit to the third digit, then from the third digit to the forth digit. Then the two colons. I tested each section as it was going together. When I got done, all was good.
     Now it was time to solder a wire to each lead from the red, green, and blue on each LED on the first digit. Because of the fifty wires needed, I chose to use a ribbon cable so I could have one ribbon for each color. This made things easier by not having to number the wires. I just labled the ribbons by color: Red, Blue, Green. I got all the wires in place and soldered some connectors to the other end.
     Now that the rgb display is assembled and wired, now it was on to get the code to work. This was going to be a little challenge because of the rgb that can give me seven colors (without pwm control).
     Well, the code did prove to be a challenge that took me a while get it sorted. But, it worked just fine.
     I wanted to add some shift registers to reduce the number of arduino I/O pins needed so, that forced me to make a circuit board to do that. That is in another blog.
     After getting the rgb pcb display boards, I started designing a box to house all of the compnents of the clock. That took a few attempts and got it done, put it all together and I now have the project finished close to what I had envisioned.
     The next option is to add buttons to adjust the time.
     This was fun and time consuming.