Arduino Talking Clock

Chlonos is an electronic gadget with a brain, a display, some sensors and a voice.

It’s something interesting to put on your wall. It can measure temperature and light, it keeps track of the time and will tell you about it all. The processor is based on the Arduino Uno platform, the display is a LoL Shield and the speech engine is the SpeakJet chip. Various analog sensors and audio circuits have been cobbled together. The firmware has been developed in C using the AVR gcc compiler.

The construction consists of three main components that piggyback together. At the bottom is the arduino next is the Prototype shield board and last is the LOL Shield. These three items physically link together. The LOL Shield is connected by the digital pins 0 to 13 and Gnd and Aref.

Construction concentrates on the Prototype shield. The connections and peripheral components are connected to the Prototype shield.

Assembly. The LOL Shield comes with two sets of pins. The set of pins towards one edge do not do anything and are not connected. It is the 16 pins in the centre that are connected to the LEDs. The pins on the back of the LOL shield could easily short if they touch other components. So add some insulation tape and tape them off. Similarly the USB socket on the Arduino comes very close to the Prototype shield and that too should have a piece of tape on top. First connect the Arduino and Prototype shield together. It is difficult to get these boards the wrong way round. Note one end of the Arduino has rounded comers. These match the Prototype shield.

Setting the Time. You may have wondered on reading up about this project how the the time is set. There is only one button but that does not set the time. The time is stored in the RTC module which runs when the power it off. It has it own button cell battery.