I needed a clock for my apartment.
My requirements:
1) 24-hour format. (I truly do not grok how "3:00" can stand for a time in the afternoon, nor how "12:30" can stand for half an hour past midnight.)
2) Must be correctly readable from across the room, without my eyeglasses. (This is a real problem with 7-segment displays: the digits are usually smashed too close together, making it hard to tell which digit a given segment belongs to.)
3) Must indicate the date. (I don't have to read the date from across the room, just the time.)
4) Must keep good time. (It is lame to have to qualify "It's 11:28" with "by my clock".)
5) Must not be ridiculously expensive. (Nixie clocks, for example, are ridiculously expensive.)
You don't know how hard it is to find a clock that fits all these requirements unless you've looked. (It is hard.)
What I ended up doing was giving up and buying a kit, instead.
Alpha Clock Five (kit)
http://evilmadscience.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/447-alphaclock
It was on sale for US$120 or so. And I had to buy solder and borrow a soldering iron just so I could get the bloody thing together and working.
For a number of reasons, including that the clock was not built to show the date, I knew I would need to modify the firmware. The firmware? Hoooo boy. Why don't you take a look?
http://evilmadscientist.s3.amazonaws.com/source/alphafive/alphaclock_18_Rev1_0.pde
It took me at least 16 hours of labor to get the thing working, correctly counting days as well as hours, minutes, and seconds, and correctly interfacing with the battery backup. And even now I'm not 100% sure I have it working properly.
Why, oh why, can't the %&$# free market even provide a decent clock for a decent price?
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Xtal compensation theory 101: Part 1
