Open Source is Wonderful, part 94

A couple of years ago, I bought an ICE Tube clock kit from Adafruit Industries. Not having touched a soldering iron in twenty years meant that I found this quite a tricky build, wiring the tube in particular. (However the online instructions were excellent, and can only have improved since.)

At the time, I'd spotted that at its heart was a programmable chip of some sort but having no idea what an ATMega was: I was happy enough to have built the thing and bask in the reflected admiration of visitors.

Until last night, that is, when I noticed that it was out by five minutes, having only been adjusted six months earlier! Comparing this with my ancient (though also digital) radio alarm-clock whose time is only adjusted after a power-cut, I wondered if I didn't know enough about AVRs now to modify the firmware to implement some sort of drift adjustment.

So I googled "icetube firmware" to find the software it had come with, and discovered there are at least four different firmware versions available, two of which have a drift adjustment feature. I went with jsgf's one, which has a bunch of other cool features, such as day- and night- brightnesses, animated transitions and the ability to turn off the seconds' display altogether (this was a deal-breaker for me originally to use it as an alarm clock).

So I ripped out the chip, discovered it was an ATMega 168v, and threw together a programmer for it, based on the In-System Programming article below --- I've updated the table there with pins for the ATMega series. Total time to implement this feature thanks to OSS? 30 minutes, as determined by the amount I had to update the clock by when I powered it back on!