I decided to do this project after seeing all the cool Numitron and nixie tube clocks out there on the internet. I thought it would be a good project to learn some low level port manipulation on the ATmega328p using the AVR dragon instead of always leaning on the arduino bootloader. This project was particularly good for this exercise because the RTC i used was a I2C device, the driver for the numitron tubes is a SPI device and I put all the leds on PWM capable pins. so by the end I had covered all the basic i/o that you would usually use on a microcontroller. The clock performs all the basic functions you would expect and to make it a little special it also has a four year count down timer. I think its important to put deadlines to your goals if you want them to be a reality so I put the timer into the clocks display routine so that everyday I am reminded that i don't have forever and i have and to work towards my goals whenever I can.