Added some logic to the LED rainbow so it dims slowly over the course of the hour before turning off for the night, and same in the morning. With that, I call this project complete!

Finally finished the LED rainbow project! After much tinkering, I gave up on the Trinket and hooked in an Arduino Nano. The memory limitations of the Trinket were being too annoying, and as I much as I like those tiny units, they are more trouble than they are worth.

I also managed to get an RTC module soldered on to the LED rainbow I designed for my daughter tonight. Everything was going well until the sketch upload to the Trinket failed.

Apparently Adafruit Trinket has this issue where it’s easy to override the bootloader by mistake. I think it happened because I was using 99% of progmem.

Solution is easy, you just hook up the Trinket to another Arduino and use a little sketch to burn a fresh bootloader. Problem was: Trinket was already soldered on the prototype board!

What followed was two hours of frustrating desoldering and attaching headers.

Lesson learned: Solder headers for core components instead of soldering them directly on prototype boards. You never know when you have to get them out again.

Flipclock prototype is working well. Had to modify the front panel design and reprint, but now it’s moving smoothly. Next step is assembling the embossed digits and minute motors.

This weekend’s project: Building an old school flip clock from scratch. I based the prototype on this awesome project, but ended up redesigning the number cards. New versions are looking great with the embossed digits.