Bob Alexander wrote in with his elegant USB clock/web data display:
When I built my Homemade Digital Clock, I shamelessly overdesigned it. It had an eight character alphanumeric display (plus two discrete LEDs for a colon), four more discrete LEDs for indicators, two printed circuit boards, and two microcontrollers (three, if you count the GPS it uses as its time source), one of which was running at 20MHz. That’s more processing power than the Apollo spacecraft had on board! All for a stupid clock!
Anyway, when I had my clock’s printed circuit boards made, I had them make several. Now, I’ve added a USB port to one of them, connected it to my PC, and written a program in C# to control it. It can fetch data from local files or the web, extract specific pieces of data, format them and display them on the LEDs. The user can enter C# expressions that evaluate to true or false and cause the discrete LEDs to light up (and even flash). The user can also configure alarm sounds and actions to take when the front panel buttons are pressed.
Also, the replica Altair 8800 in the background is sexayy!
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