Happy Birthday

to ebonhost

New Toy

Took a trip to Free Geek today. I was dropping off some old, dead and partial hardware.

Decided to make a pass thru the thrift shop. Saw several things that might have beeninteresting, but not worth the trouble of finding out for sure.

Then I spotted it, buried under other stuff on the miscallaneous small devices shelves.

An oddly shaped gray box with a wall wart, and several odd rows of LEDs. It had a discovery channel logo.

I checked a couple other thing, but carried it with me as I didx.

Then I hauled it up to the counter where they had a power strip to test things.

I plugged it in. The LEDs lit up. I tried the buttons and I could set it.

So I asked how nuch (it didn't have a price marked). When I was told $2, I bought it, quickly.

I am now the proud owner of an Anelace "Powers of 2" clock.

When I got home, I noticed that something wasn't quite right when I set the hours. Then I realized that it was in 12-hour mode, and the display was BCD, not pure binary.

A bit of searching found a web page with info on how to set it.

It's currently in 24-houir BCD mode. Though I may try to switch it to "true binary" mode later.

The LEDs are arranged like this:

  0   0   0
  0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0

first column is 10s of hours
next is hours
next is tens of minutes
next is minutes
tens of seconds
seconds.

So current time is:

  0   0   0
  0 * * 0 0
* 0 0 * 0 *
0 0 0 * 0 *

20:47:03

In true binary mode it works like this

  0   0   0	(unused)
  0 0 0 0 0	(hours)
0 0 0 0 0 0	(minutes)
0 0 0 0 0 0	(seconds)

So the same time would be

  0   0   0
  * 0 * 0 0	20
* 0 * * * *	47
0 0 0 0 * *	03