Single-digit incandescent binary clock

Hello. This is my first post here. I have four matching 12 volt incandescent indicator lights, and I am looking for a circuit to drive them as a single-digit, 24-hour binary clock. The lights would cycle through each digit of a 24-hour time (i.e. 19:45 for 7:45 PM) in the same format as the popular single-digit nixie clocks. My electronics experience is limited to my studies in the 80's, before Arduinos and similar devices. Can anyone help me with this?

So let me get this straight... you want to display one digit at a time in binary format... so for the above example, the four lights would cycle through the patterns 0001 1001 0100 0101 for 19:45?
How do you intend to derive the actual time, or is this also part of your project?

Yes, I would like the lights to cycle through the binary patterns as you describe, approximately one digit every 1-2 seconds with a pause before repeating. I had thought of using a frequency divider circuit based either on AC line frequency or a crystal as a timebase. Honestly, I don't know enough about the single-digit nixie clock kits because they use proprietary, pre-programmed IC's and I don't know enough about programming to make one of my own.

Maybe its time for you to do a PIC project.

I agree with Mike, this is a microcontroller based project.


For the actual timekeeping, I would use a DS1307 real time clock. Inexpensive and simple to use (with a microcontroller) as it has all the necessary logic to count months, days, hours, minutes and seconds plus the actual day of the week (e.g. Thursday).
It will do leap years, and has an external battery backup such that it won't lose time if you lose power. Uses an inexpensive 32.768Khz crystal.