DIY Arduino Word Clock on Unknown Serial VFD Display

This time I will show you how to make a nice retro look word clock, made of such a Display. Word clock, because current time is presented in the form of text instead of numbers. Of course, there is also a mode in which time and date are presented in standard form.

Hardware Used:

• Arduino Nano R3
• Maxim Integrated DS3231M - ±5ppm, I2C Real-Time Clock
• Unknown serial VFD Display taken from old customer Display
• Custom PCB
• Slide Switch

Software Used:

• Arduino IDE

As the title suggests, to make the device is used an unknown VFD serial display, which previously was used as a POS customer display. In one of my previous videos, I explained how to connect almost any serial VFD display to Arduino.

This time I will present you another, simpler way to connect a VFD display to Arduino. According to the markings on the chips, we will first find out which of them is a microcontroller. In this case, it is a Winbond W78C32C-40 microcontroller. Now in Datasheet, we are looking for which of the pins of the microcontroller is Rx. As we can see, in our case it is pin 10. At this pin, we bring directly the signal from the Arduino microcontroller and that's it. Of course, we need also to connect the power supply as described in the video above.

The Arduino and Real-Time clock board are mounted (glued) directly to the display PCB using double-sided adhesive. This avoids making a box and enables this minimalistic design. The display holder is made entirely of Plexiglass.

First, we need to set the exact time on the Realtime clock module, and that is the simplest to do through the examples in the DS1307 Library. We need to upload this code in Arduino and so the time is automatically adjusted (synchronized) with the time from PC. After that, we upload the code in Arduino, and the device is ready. The exact time is indicated by words. Refresh is done every minute.

As I said before, there is also a mode in which time and date are presented in standard form. We Can enable this mod by a second small switch. I am from Macedonia and my native language is Macedonian, so I also made a code where the Time is displayed in Macedonian with Cyrillic alphabet.