Not seeing scope in directive - angularjs

Question

I have a controller that passes two variables to my view via $scope. I can display those variables in the view.
In my view I have a directive, where I pass in the two variables to the directive scope.
Here is my directive:
.directive('notes', function(){
return {
restrict: 'E',
templateUrl:'views/directives/notes-tpl.html',
scope:{
time:'=',
unit:'='
},
controller:['$scope',function($scope){
console.log('Current Time Stamp: ' + $scope.time);
console.log('Current Unit Stamp: ' + $scope.unit);
};
}]
};
})
and here is my html:
<notes time='currentTimeStamp' unit='currentUnitStamp'></notes>
Problem is my console.log() shows them as undefined.
I'm calling the directive from a modal:
<!-- NOTES MODAL -->
<script type="text/ng-template" id="notesModal.html">
<div class="modal-header">
<a class="close" data-dismiss="modal" aria-label="Close" ng-click="close()"><span aria-hidden="true">×</span></a>
<h3 class="modal-title">Notes</h3>
</div>
<notes currentTimeStamp='{{currentTimeStamp}}' currentUnitStamp='{{currentUnitStamp}}'></notes>
</script>

Answer 1

After seeing your example a new guess:
That's your HTML for calling the directive
<notes currentTimeStamp='{{currentTimeStamp}}' currentUnitStamp='{{currentUnitStamp}}'></notes>
But your notes.js hasn't any binding for this.
return {
...
scope: {
currentTimeStamp="",
currentUnitStamp=""
}
...
}
You need to pass this into your directive like this:
<notes current-time-stamp='currentTimeStamp' current-unit-stamp='currentUnitStamp'></notes>
Pay attention to the current-time-stamp instead of currentTimeStamp.
Check out the Normalization section.
https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/directive
I hope this one will solve your issue.
Another guess:
Could it be you are updating "out of angular" in pure JS.
So angular doesn't know it has to update your values.
Let's say you would update some values on the click Event. Now we are using angulars ng-click for updating and calling a method (so angular would kick of the digest cycle by itself and would update the values).
Like this: ng-click="updateTimeStamp()
Now for some reason we don't use angular, but instead a native event listener:
element.addEventListener("click", updateTimeStamp);
So if we want now update the scope and its values, we have to kick of the digest cycle for example with a $timeout service.
More Information about the digest cycle: https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/scope
For verification put a $timeout(angular.noop); at the end of the listener where you set the values.
Example:
myElement.addEventListener("click", function () {
var newTime = takeMeFromSomewhere;
$scope.time = newTime;
// Angular doesn't know to update the binding!
$timeout(angular.noop);
// now you kicked off the digest cycle and angular will update the values
});