As I said on my last post, I plan on building a digital clock using an LCD and an Atmel328. For now, I just plan on getting my feet wet with a simple LCD project. Sooner or later I’m going to need a pretty reliable RTC to store the time and date. Ideally, I’d like to build a clock that grabs the time from a GPS satellite, but I’m not there yet. Adafruit and Sparkfun both sell cheap $9 RTCs as a DIY kit. Since I was ordering my Arduino board from Adafruit, I figured I’d add the DS1307 Breakout Kit to my cart too.



From Adafruit:

This is a great battery-backed real time clock (RTC) that allows your microcontroller project to keep track of time even if it is reprogrammed, or if the power is lost. Perfect for datalogging, clock-building, time stamping, timers and alarms, etc. The DS1307 is the most popular RTC, and works best with 5V-based chips such as the Arduino.

So basically, if I build a clock, it’ll keep track of the time even when the power is lost. Sounds like a must-have feature for any clock project!



It’s a pretty easy build. I had the board put together in just a few minutes. Everything’s labelled on the board so it’s pretty easy to see where everything goes. There’s also a tutorial on Adafruit.com if you need it.



I don’t know when I’ll need it, but it’s nice to know that it’s ready to go when the day comes.