Binary clock innards

I noticed that one of the lights on my binary clock wasn’t lighting up anymore, and another one was only lighting up very dimly. Thinking that maybe it would be a simple fix to replace some LEDs, I popped it open and have a look inside. It was pretty easy to open up with just 4 tabs to unclip.

Everything is all on one board with surface mount LEDs (labeled D7 – D26) instead of the regular LEDs I was expecting.

Binary clock circuit board

The dead diode is D24, and the fading one is D18.

The six 1N4001 diodes do some rectification of the 9VAC input power. I haven’t traced out the circuit yet to see how they’re arranged.

A PIC16C505 microcontroller is the heart of the binary clock. The other chip above the PIC controller (U2) is a 5V voltage regulator, which provides the power to the PIC controller.

I wonder how hard it would be to find some LEDs to replace the dead ones with.

Update: Traced out the arrangement of the diodes and this is what it seems to look like.

Schematic for the power rectification part of the binary clock


It’s a bridge rectifier taking the 9V AC input and doing full wave rectification