Before we begin with the third update, we would like to take a moment and wish everyone one of you a Happy New Year :) Time passes so slowly if you are unaware of it and so quickly if you are aware of it.

What we want to emphasize is that "Time is of the essence" (term used for expressing "the need for timely completion"). That’s why with the Winkel Board, we wanted to have you covered for all those time dependent projects, where you would require certain actions to be completed at specified time intervals.

High precision DS3231 RTC module on the Winkel Board allows you to take up such projects with ease. Not only that, with ESP8266-ESP12e you can read accurate time from the internet and then set that time to DS3231’s memory so you are assured of having accurate time and date on the controller at all times.

There are several uses cases where time keeping becomes an essential part of an electronics and telecommunication project. For example :

• In Plant watering system, where you want to pump water to the plants every morning at 9:00 AM
• In home automation projects to schedule devices or relay modules.
• You want to achieve Time Synchronisation between master node (winkel board) and other slave nodes (other boards) in a Radio Network to ensure all nodes have accurate time.

Setting up time and date on the winkel board is very easy. We have used "Arduino-DS3231" library forked from HERE to interact with DS3231 Real-Time-Clock. Below is a small video tutorial showing how you can set Date and Time on the Winkel Board.

Let us know what you think. In the next update we will cover some questions regarding why we revived ATmega128, why a dual MCU architecture and some comparison with the latest ESP32 module. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach us and we shall feature/cover/answer them on the next update.