A cable BOX BECOMES A NETWORK TIME screen

In 2011 [Erkki]’s DVB box provided up the ghost. It had been a fixture of his media center for rather a while, decoding cable as well as recording shows faithfully for years. A flaky power supply will bring down the mightiest machine, though. as well as the Topfield box ultimately discovered itself in disuse. One thing [Erkki] liked about this cable box is its wonderful eco-friendly LED clock – even after the box had been declared dead, he still utilized it as a clock. Not wanting to keep a faulty machine on life support, [Erkki] decided to strip the digestive tracts as well as replace them with a networked Arduino that receives time over a network

[Erkki] originally utilized an Arduino as well as an ENC28J60 Ethernet module to get time from an NTP server as well as spit it out onto the LCD display. A full Arduino for this type of job, particularly one that’s a more or less total project, is a bit overkill so [Erkki] designed a PCB to put his ‘duino to much better use.

One fascinating bit about this develop is that [Erkki] discovered it totally damaged one day. Figuring this was a issue with the microcontroller, he very first fried the ATMega with 9 volts – the reasons getaway us, nevertheless – as well as started work on programming a new chip. After looking at different ports on his NTP server with a microcontroller, [Erkki] realized he had reset his network switch recently, meaning the previous microcontroller was working perfectly.

In the future, [Erkki] really hopes to add some new features to this 8×4 seven-segment screen sitting in a big box; something like reading off the temperature, inspecting IRC as well as his physical mailbox, as well as notifying him when somebody is at the front door.