Adding Control Buttons To ArduiNIX?

[blkadder]

Greetings All,
Well, I assembled my ArduiNIX, and all is working well.  One thing that never entered my mind is how do I set the time with this setup.  I am very very new when it comes to the Arduino and the ArduiNIX, so please bear with me.

I have assembled Nixie clocks from kits in the past, but those all had the control buttons indicated on the control board.

My question to you guys is, how do I add control buttons to this setup.  I have read everything I could find on the board here, but nothing is clicking in my head.  If anyone has a link or some info to share, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

Ron

[linux-works]

one suggestion is to use an IR receiver and integrate the ir receive arduino code (lots of examples).  once you go thru a 'learn', you can have access to a whole set of buttons and only have to have 1 hole in your chassis (for the ir) and only 1 line on the arduino needed to get you lots of buttons.

I don't know how the IR interrupt code will play with software based muxing, though.

you can use port expanders (i2c) and define them as inputs (with pullups to 5v) and to sense them you do an i2c (wire.h) read.

if there are local pins on the arduino, you can use them, too, of course.

[Risen]

You can check out my code (shared on this forum) to see how I've used a pushbutton and a rotary encoder for time/mode set inputs using the Arduino's analog pins. My code also solves the delay problem in getting inputs that the sample code would have. It doesn't keep time, though, as I used an external RTC. Hope it helps.