Although things have been going on, there's not really a lot to talk about, or more importantly, show. So I thought I would give a basic schematic for how the display is hooked up. The display consists of 4 KingBright TC40-11EWA modules.

As you can see, the LED's are broken up into a matrix by row and column. You can address an individual LED by grounding the appropriate column, and applying power to the appropriate row. Its much more efficient to address an entire row or column at once though.

On the circuit board that the modules are attached to, the column all have individual signal lines, but the row signal lines for the 4 modules are tied together. This is the approximate schematic for how the display is connected to the micro-controller.

The micro-controller currently draws on the display by activating the column lines (all 20), one after the other, with the appropriate row lines being active. It draws sufficiently fast that there is no flicker, this may change as more features are added. In which case I may switch to drawing by activating the row lines one by one, and grounding the appropriate columns. Which would work through a draw cycle in 7 (slightly longer) iterations instead of 20.

The clock software now allows the time to be set (as well as the alarm time). When powered on, the display will flash on and off about once a second, and moving the arms will adjust the hour and minutes. When the time is appropriately set, you bob Tri-Bot on his head to return to normal functioning.

Mainly whats left to be implemented in the software is the alarm feature. The tricky part is going to be getting Tri-Bot into his alarm mode. The IR codes for Tri-Bot appear to have a new twist, and until I (or someone else) has figured them out, I'm not going to be able to enable Tri-Bots alarm function at the appropriate time.