Ben Heck shows how he designed his Super Alarm Clock in the video above. I like the use of the simple push button rotary knob that is used to adjust the time. Gone is the array of small buttons along the top which have lettering so small it takes longer to figure out how to adjust the time than it does to actually make the adjustment. Having the clock know what day it is so that the alarm doesn’t sound on the weekend is a cool idea, I am not sure why more clocks don’t have this option. A Parallax propeller microcontroller is being used to power the project so there is no lack of power here. Transistor arrays are used here to drive the LED display and a johnson counter is used to control many display elements with only a few microcontroller pins. In the end the entire LED matrix was scrapped and normal 7 segment LED displays being driven by some shift registers were used. 🙁