DS1307 I²C Clock using arduino
I²C is an addressable serial interface. That means that you can communicate with many I²C devices using the same 4 PINS all the time. On the Arduino Duemilanove, the SDAand SCL lines are connected to analog in pin 4 and analog in pin 5 by default, but this can be changed by editing the Wire library. The I²C specification requires the SDA line to be pulled up when not in use, but all of the ATmega328 pins have internal PULL UP RESISTORS, which saves us having to use an external one. The DS1307 datasheetshows the full pinout of the chip.
Below is a schematic of the circuit diagram. It looks slightly different to my actual circuit, but that was only because Fritzing didn’t have the components in the library, so I either replaced them with functionally identical components or else made them using a generic component. A Nokia 3310 LCD shield was added to display the time, but again, this doesn’t exist in Fritzing.
The DS1307 uses a 32.768kHz crystal connected between pins 1 and 2 to create the oscillations needed to drive the clock. The downside to this, of course, is that temperature variations will cause the clock to lose or gain seconds. In my experience however, this was negligible. Once set, the DS1307 will keep time provided that it is powered either by the Arduino, or the 3V button backup battery. I wrote the Arduino sketch to accept the date in the standard output format from the *nix date command. That meant that to sync the clock, I simply had to pipe the date command to the serial port.
