A bit of overt geekdom here, but we’ve been getting a few requests for designs that relate to time — a peculiar watch design for one, and an even more provocative sort of life time-piece. And time is one of the design idioms we’re interested in anyway, so I went ahead and constructed a break-out board for the DS32C35 real-time clock. It’s got a couple of handy features, including a rather large cache of nonvolatile FRAM for data storage (8kb on the “C” variant, 2kb on the “B” variant). That can be useful for applications where some sort of data needs to be stored, like in Flavonoid where we’re time-stamping activity measurements, or the Slow Messenger where potentially large messages need to be stored. The chip also has a built-in crystal for the actual time keeping part, which reduces the parts count. It communicates using the I2C protocol — convenient — and will keep time on a simple low-voltage battery backup or a “super capacitor”. (This design uses a small coin-cell, on the back there.)