I couldn’t take it any longer. I haven’t played in a long time so I decided to start from scratch and design another digital clock. I’m working on the board right now. I had one more display, RTC, and 32.768KHz xtal left.
I am building my own display driver this time though. The display driver will be an MCP23S17 multiplexer and a PIC16F690 microcontroller. The display driver that I used in the Picaxe clock was about $8. Not counting the amount of time I’ve spent writing the code my display driver should be about $2. Plus, I really don’t want to have to buy a driver and then spend the money on shipping when I have what it takes to make something work. We’ll see how it goes. In theory it seems like it will work.
I’ll explain more in a few weeks. I’m also tackling this project to create a C header file for the DS1305. It might help someone else out who is trying to work with it.