IR-controlled musical alarm clock
posted Feb 15th 2011 6:04am by Mike Nathanfiled under: Microcontrollers, musical hacks
Forum user [Frank] shared with us his recent project, a musical alarm clock. More than just a simple alarm clock, his creation allows the user to load music onto a micro SD card, has alarm settings for each day of the week, and best of all, can be controlled using an IR remote. He uses a Teensy++ to control most of the clock’s functions including the display, delegating the time keeping to a DS1307 real-time clock. All of the audio playback is handled by a separate music decoder mounted on a breakout board.
His Instructables writeup is extremely detailed, with tons of annotations, pictures, diagrams, and source code available. He walks through each step in detail, making this a great learning guide for others looking to start in on AVR programming.
His final presentation is a great lesson in recycling, though unfortunately a bit lackluster, as the clock is packaged in an old SparkFun cardboard box. He does mention that there were some time constraints towards the end, which may explain this choice – it would be nice to see a revised version of this clock packaged in a nice plexi case.
DAMMIT!
I was working on a project extremely similar to this. I thought it up in August, but have only really made headway lately. (Sadistic) MP3 playing alarm clock using an ATMEGA32A, VS1053, and an SD card for storage. Mine is going to use a VFD display instead of an LCD, though. I’m also using a DS3231 instead, which I have because I sampled it for a previous project. The word sadistic comes from how difficult I am going to make it to snooze and turn off. Think missile switches and decreasing snooze-time. Maybe some more annoying stuff as I come up with it.
This instructable has me no longer afraid of dealing with SD cards and the FAT filesystem, thanks! I’ll take a closer look at it after work.
I appreciate your work, even if it makes my project less novel. Just let it be known that when (and if) I submit it to hackaday that the idea was conjured up in Summer 2010. Procrastination is a bitch.