Digital watches - Assignment Example

The designed watch is reliable, portable and fully functional with a 10-segment LCD display unit. The watch start with the hour, minute and second counters set to zero. After every, minute or hour the respective counter increments while continuously checking the sum. When it hits fifty-nine, both the second and minute counters reset to zero whereas the hour counter resets at counter sum of twenty-four. Time is a basic physical quantity measured by use of instrument like a watch. In simple terms, time requires a specified physical process that proceeds at a known rate (Abayomi-Alli et al 3), and a method to measure the continuity of the process.

Several categories and sizes of watches are in use. On of the determinant factor in classification of watches is how time is displayed (Abayomi-Alli et al 5). There are four different classes of watches. These include analog watches, digital watches and auditory watches. Digital watches usually display numeric time version. The most common numeric display formats are the 24-hour and the 12-hour notations. The 24- hour notation has hours counter running from 00 to 23 whereas the 12 hour notation uses the symbols AM indicating time from midnight to one minute to noon.

The PM symbol runs from noon to one minute to midnight. Digital watches employ the use of an LCD or LED for displaying the time (Abayomi-Alli et al 2). In the making of digital watch, microcontrollers are used as the main control of the entire circuit. For effectiveness, the microcontrollers are interfaced with other components to complete the digital watch circuit. Such a component includes a counter which is mainly one of the Real Time Watch IC (Abayomi-Alli et al 3). This is “a low-voltage, high-performance CMOS 8-bit microcontroller” (Abayomi-Alli et al 5).

It has a 4 kilobytes (KB) of Flash erasable and programmable read-only memory (FEPROM). The 8-bit microcontroller