The Nick Dawkins Homepage 2005

Psion Software                Artificial Hand

PIC Spinning Clock and World Map Display

Here are brief details of a project I completed using a PIC 16F73 Micro-controller. I'd seen persistence of vision clocks, like these from Bob Blick and Daryl Bender, on the Internet and wanted to take things a step further. I wanted to make a display which displayed a clock and a spinning map of the World.

Although I had practically no PIC programming experience, I had some programming experience on Psion handhelds having written shareware for them in the past. I did a little learning using a prototype board from Farnell to flash a few LED's and went from there!

My device uses 19 LED's and a 24V motor for the main drive. For an easier build I decided to use a battery to power the PCB and LED's. If enough interest is shown in this device, I will update the site with full build instructions and make  the final source code free to download.

Below are a few pictures of the device, and a link to a video clip. I found using my digital camera did not produce great pictures of the device in motion, but take my word for it, the actual effect is great!

Below is a picture of the map used to generate the map data. The map was divided up into a grid of 19 x 82 squares. 19 for the number of LED's in the device, and 82 to improve the resolution of the picture generated as the device spins. In the map, if a grid square was more than 50% covered in land, I made this a lit LED point. This worked well, with only a few adjustments needed to improve the look of the display.

A video of the device working can be downloaded or viewed here

Further information on building the clock and obtaining the source code for the

micro-controller will be given in exchange for a small donation to my artificial hand project.

Please transfer £10 into my Paypal account using the link on the artificial hand page

and e-mail me. I will then provide more detailed information on building the clock and

also provide a copy of the source code used.

Contact Me

© Nick Dawkins January 2005 - Swindon UK