Introduction: Father's Day "Pong Clock"

About: Just getting into the microcontroller craze. I used to do this sort of thing building circuits for 8 bit microprocessors back in the early 80s, so this is kind of like reliving a bit of my childhood. Back then…

Many of you have already built, or plan to build the infamous "Pong Clock" seen here on Instructables by mrnick1234567.
I've made a few improvements, and spruced it up for dear old Dad.

After surveying a number of parents who might like the clock, there were 2 complaints that were most often repeated.

They either want 24 hour time or 12 hour time. On this they seem split, as there is a large military population here.
The non-military prefer a 12 hour clock, while military parents prefer the 24 hour clock.
This version of the pong clock lets you select which you want to use.

The other issue was that if they wanted it at a distance, the brightness was fine, but it was too bright for a nightstand etc.
This version of the pong clock has a brightness control.

Also, if you change from 12 to 24 hour time or change the brightness, it immediately returns you to whatever clock mode you were running before making the change.

The video doesn't show the brightness change well because the camera keeps compensating for it, but it's quite noticeable.

There is one small glitch in that when you set the time, it may display the wrong date immediately upon exiting the time setting routine. I may address this later if anyone finds it problematic. The time does set correctly, and after exiting the routine to a clock mode, it displays correctly thereafter.

If you aren't good at coding, I have included the hex file for easy upload to the clock.
I will also provide the source code.
Since a PDE file is plain text anyway, and this place won't let us upload a .PDE, I put .txt at the end. Just rename it if you want to open it directly, or copy and paste the text into the Arduino 0023. You can't use the new IDE to upload it - you must use an older version, and this was compiled in 0023. You can still get older versions online, so don't worry. I run both.

The .hex file you can just upload direct to the clock with AVRDude or some other similar program.

Happy Father's Day everybody!

Keep an eye out...later I will likely be adding capacitive touch and other cool things like Temperature etc. once I get that all figured out.
You can download the video here or watch HERE on YouTube.

Father's Day Contest

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Father's Day Contest