If you haven’t seen a TIX clock before you can see (or purchase) one from Think Geek. They are very cool looking, and in my opinion. I first saw them being used by Chris Pirillo. What is better than buying a TIX clock would be to make your own, that is exactly what Guido Seevens from Gweeds.net did. He documented the DIY TIX Clock build here and provided all of the AVR code so that you could make your own if you so desired.
“Originally I wanted to have time adjustment done via a pulse encoder. So one could select the hours or minutes and then tweak them up or down using a little rotary knob. Unfortunately, finding components like rotary encoders in little old New Zealand is a bit difficult, so I had to resort to 3 push buttons. Secondly the display had to be multiplexed as there is a total of 27 LED’s in the display. Having all those LED’s on at one time would draw great amounts of current plus also needing a great number of IO lines. I ended up multiplexing the display from left to right, so that there is never more than three LED’s on at any time.”
