Hello everyone, in this article I’d like to share with you my experience in designing a digital wrist watch on rare and vintage LED indicators. The main source of inspiration for this project came, of course, from very unusual matrix LED indicators HDSP-2000 (fig. 1).
Figure 1.
When I saw them for the very first time I immediately fell in love with them. First of all, it was very unlikely for me to ever find a 4 digit matrix display in a 12-pin DIP ceramic package. Another stunning detail about this display is that crystals on which located shift registers, which are used to drive LED matrices, can be clearly seen through the glass screen, as well as the golden wires that connect all the parts together (fig. 2).
Figure 2.
I’ve bought several models of this displays, each of them has its own color of light that is emitted from the LEDs.
- HDSP-2000 – has red LEDs and red filtering glass;
- HDPS-2001 – has yellow LEDs and clear glass;
- QDSP-2009 (HDSP-2002) – has green LEDs and clear glass as well;
As I got them I thought that it would be great idea to make on these displays some sort of string line. The best devise into which I could implement such a string, in my opinion, was a wrist watch. I think it pretty cool to have a wrist watch with such an unusual and rare indicators. Another reason why I decided to make this project is a lack of any interesting tasks and projects, so I believed that designing of this watches might be beneficial to my further grows as an electronic engineer.
The first thing I decided to do was an inclusion of features, that will have my wrist watch.
- The most obvious one is the display of time – hours, minutes and seconds by clicking on specific button. A display of date, day of the week, month, year and charge will be added as well.
- Another feature is indication of charging process, for example when battery is charging some led should emit light and when the battery is full – this led should turn off.
- The last feature is setting of time and date.
Of course, this is not the biggest list of possible features (alarm, timers) but this watches do not need a myriad of them to be magnificent. Just the look of its vintage indicators will make everyone adore it :)
Below are shown photos of finished wrist watch (without and with case).
With this link you can find video of this watch in action: link to video
