Well I finally got around to write the code for the clock. Its working pretty well, for anyone who is writing code for an AVR micro-controller I cannot recommend VMLab highly enough, it is a great shame that it is no longer being actively maintained.

This is the first attempt at numbers, you will notice that they are backwards (easy to fix). Chubby numbers, while nice in theory, turn out to be hard to read. At this point the clock starts count from 00:00 when powered up and nothing else.

Here I have changed to using skinny numbers, and not that you can tell, but the number orientation has been corrected. No other changes were made at this stage. I'm wasn't particularly happy with how dim the LED's are, so I removed the current limiting resistors. Which netted a small change, but not enough. So I changed the circuit to drive the display rows through a second set of transistors, rather that straight from the micro-controller outputs.

Some times whats not there is just as important as what is there. A transistor, at its simplest, is also an inverter (ie one becomes zero or on becomes off). This is simple to fix in the software. Yes I did actually leave it running over 21 hours before snapping this photo. I let it run for for over a day, so that I could compare it to another clock to make sure it was keeping time.

The software now has several new features, when powered up, it resets to 12:00. There is an alarm time (although it doesn't actually do anything right now), accessible by pressing a button (this will be linked to depressing Tri-Bot's head), and while viewing the alarm time, it can be changed by pressing an hour or minute button (these will be linked to Tri-Bot's arms).

That's it for now.