Sundial Application in the 21st Century

Overview

An Atmel ATtiny24 is used in this project to produce a sundial with a line LASER employed for representing the pinion.

Explanation

The use of ATtiny24 microcontroller comes with a crystal for better accuracy. This makes it easy to achieve the precision from crystal quartz although the internal RC oscillator could be calibrated. Other components that comprise the device include capacitors, power supply, servo, transistor, and LASER. The microcontroller drives the LASER that is mounted on a RC servo by keeping the time and accordingly turning the RC servo. A real-time clock is run by the microcontroller as the time is converted into minutes from 1:00 hours and converted in PWM pulse making it suitable for driving an RC servo.

To display different things such as a voltage at an analog input of the microcontroller, the circuit and software can be modified, creating a LASER analog meter. An L-shaped piece of aluminum, a few tiny screws, and a Teflon fastener are the things used to easily attach the LASER to the RC servo. The In-circuit debugging capabilities of the ATtiny24 is used to debug the code with the AVR Dragon in the software.