Simple Digital Clock with PIC16F628A and DS1307 and 7-Segment LED display

In this new project I am again using PIC16F628A microcontroller. The goal is simple digital clock with 7-segment LED display and the clock will have no additional functionality - no alarm, no seconds digits, no date. The latter can be added in the software though. For the RTC chip I chose DS1307. For the LED display I used Kingbright CC56-21SRWA.

100MHz frequency counter

Couple of weeks ago I purchased from eBay one of these amazingly cheap an useful modules with MAX7219 LED driver and 8 digit LED display. It is ideal for frequency counter project. The problem was the absence of library for PIC microcontrolers. Luckily, I found a great library for Arduino and I reworked it to be compatible with PIC. The schematic of the frequency counter is actually almost the same as the previous . It uses PIC16F628A microcontroller with external 32.768kHz watch crystal attached to Timer1 to generate 1 second time base. Measured signal is fed to pin3 (RA4) which is counted by Timer0.

Frequency counter with PIC16F628A

Some time ago I made an audio oscillator with frequency counter which worked very well, but I sold it, and now I am making a new one. The oscillator itself will be mostly the same and when I finish the whole project there will be a separate article. Here I will show the frequency counter module I made for the project.

LED VU Meter with LM3916

This was finished months ago and just now I had time to finish the article. LM3916 is a dedicated IC for VU LED meter.  Unlike LM3915 which have 3dB step between voltage levels, the LM3916 have nonlinear steps: -20, -10, -7, -5, -3, -1, 0, +1, +2, +3db, just like old school analog VU meters. I saw in YouTube an interesting commercial LED VU meter, which imitates the needle movement in analog VU meters and I thought I can make a similar one. All I needed I found in the datasheet of LM3916.