Hello! I'm going to document the building and configuration of my new NTP display clock.  It's based on the ST Microelectronics STM32H735 Discovery Kit board.  I've had a history with NTP clocks.  Ten years ago, I got a #Twatch.  This was an early Internet device that would connect to an Ethernet connection, and retrieve the top trending tags on Twitter.  It was based on the Microchip PIC 18F67J60 microcontroller, and it was paired with a commonplace 20x2 character LCD based on the Hitachi 44780.  A very common and useful display.

I didn't care about the Twitter functionality, so I wrote an SNTP clock display.  I work at my local cable-TV community-access studio;  I built the network.  I've long wanted to get NTP display clocks for the facility, but they are very expensive.  Ten years since I built the original clock, and I'm still dismayed:  I cannot buy an NTP clock.  The Net is still complicated enough that I can't just get a clock and plug it in.  Our facility has an NTP server, but no clock displays.

I couldn't go any further with the original #Twatch:  The microcontroller was long discontinued, and there was a hard limit on the number of times I could flash the controller--no more than 50 to 100 times.  Once I got the bugs out of my clock, I couldn't do more with it.  Nevertheless, the clock has been very reliable--it has just passed its 10th anniversary as I'm writing this.

This past winter, I wanted to refresh the clock and find new hardware to keep up my skills.  I did an extensive search.

No, really.

I just saw an banner ad from Digi-Key that advertised the STM32H735 Discovery Kit.  I'm not great at scratch building, so it seemed to have all I needed to make a clock, and so I bought it.  As I write, I've had the device for three months and have been coding with it for most of that time.

I can't give a complete tutorial for embedded devices in this log.  But ST Micro, fairly or unfairly, has a reputation for having a steep learning curve, and I do want to highlight some of the problems I had to solve while bringing the clock to its implementation.