Hey guys. I'm building a new PC tonight when I get off work (everything came in today). This isn't happening immediately, but I plan to, just for fun, outfit my unused drive bay a small character LCD. Is it possible to snag data off the real-time clock on my motherboard and use it to display the date and time? I may power my circuit with an FTDI USB to RS232/TTL level cable, so if I can't wire physically to the RTC I suppose I can write a small program that runs whenever I start the computer and it would then send the data out on that port.
it's not very likely you're able to grab it off the chip... Only really old motherboards have the possibility (big-enough a chip) to solder wires to it or anything like that... just write some software to dump it through RS232... what are you going to control that LCD with? µC?
Yeah, I'll probably control it with a PIC, since that's what's most readily available to me. I'll be stealing power off a USB port anyway (with an FTDI Chip TTL-232R module), so I think I will just write up a program that runs in the background, that takes the time from the operating system's clock, which is better anyway as the computer clock is set to universal time and the clock in the OS is adjusted for my time zone anyway. That's probably the better way to do it... Thanks
