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Rob Oplawar
May 4th, 2007, 05:34 PM
Actually, mine cost about $70 I think.
http://www.spacebrick.net/pictures/blog_gallery/clock.jpg
It contains:
30 resistors,
18 capacitors,
62 LEDs (only 48 of them are used though),
2 pushbuttons,
14 7400 series chips (5 4 bit counters, 3 7-segment coverters, 1 oscillator chip, 2 NAND chips, 1 OR chip, 1 AND chip, and 1 NOT chip),
and at least 40 feet of small gauge wire
And that's not counting the power supply which has its own simple complexity, and I built that too.

Not that it's all that difficult to build a digital clock, but before taking the class I took this semester I had absolutely no electronics experience, so it's really gratifying to see the thing work in the end. It's a pretty common deal for colleges to offer an intro to electronics course in which you build a clock, and although it's the most expensive and crappy digital clock you've ever seen, it's totally worth it to know exactly how it works, so I highly reccommend it to all of you.

The back side:
http://www.spacebrick.net/pictures/blog_gallery/clock2.jpg
I'm not very tidy with my wires =P

oh and in the parts list I included the debounce circuit for the switches, which I hadn't added yet when I took the pictures.

rossmum
May 4th, 2007, 07:05 PM
Cool. Chunky, though :p

thehoodedsmack
May 4th, 2007, 09:06 PM
The $100 time bomb kit? Cool!

Cortexian
May 4th, 2007, 11:32 PM
Meh, I took a robotics course were we made our own silicon boards for the robots we made... So whenever I see those pre-made boards, they look ugly.

I've got no idea were the bot is though, built it a couple years ago... Otherwise I would get a pic.

legionaire45
May 5th, 2007, 11:20 PM
Meh, I took a robotics course were we made our own silicon boards for the robots we made... So whenever I see those pre-made boards, they look ugly.

I've got no idea were the bot is though, built it a couple years ago... Otherwise I would get a pic.
were you involved with FIRST at all?

If you were, last year I was on Team 4.

I took an electronics class with this one guy from a nearb-by college. He never actually taught us how the things actually worked, just how to read the circuit diagrams, V=IR, etc. That was in an entire semester btw. I could have wiki'd it and learned it probably =/.

mR_r0b0to
May 6th, 2007, 02:32 AM
Get a breadboard. SO much easier than that.
And we built a clock for a final project in Digital 1. Was a bitch.