This Graphic LCD clock doesn’t have a fancy case, but [Gregory Wright] built in so many great features we think it will serve as inspiration for many projects to come. If he does decide to add a case it will be quite easy as there are no buttons to work around.
Without buttons how can the thing be adjusted? He decided to go with an IR remote control for all settings. This gives him a lot more options than a handful of buttons would have. Plus, heavy sleepers will need to find the remote control in order to shut off the alarm. We also think it’s interesting that the 595 shift registers he used have a low enough data high threshold (3.15V when VCC is 4.5V) that he didn’t need level converters to drive the 5V display with his 3.3V MSP430 Launchpad.
Check out his video after the break to learn about all the features he included in the UI. Our favorite is shown on the bottom right where it says “Hello World”. This is an area dedicated to a custom message for each day. He uses it to remind him about trash day (now there’s a feature!).
I think “smart clocks” ™ are the next big thing.
Unfortunately, this hack has a few smart clock features that are cool, but the UI and remote control is way too clunky to be practical.
I thought smart clocks were going to be big, so I decorated my house with chumby’s… Now my house is littered with… slightly-less-functional-then-before chumbys. :(
I agree. That’s my current pet project too. Virtuall ALL alarm clocks SUCK, real hard!
I used an old netbook as the base for mine. It’s just a simple C# project, where GDI+ is used to draw things on the screen (with full color and AA), LINQ to XML grabs the local weather from a web service and the news from a RSS feed, the SpeechSynthesizer and SpeechRecognizer classes give it full voice support (like saying the weather, or for setting alarms, or saying something like “snooze 20” in the morning).
It’s synchonized with an atomic clock and it handles DST automatically too. I have 2 “standard” weekday alarms, 2 for the weekend, 2 temporary (tomorrow only) alarms for special events so you don’t have to deprogram your usual alarms, adjustable snooze intervals and so on.
Of course it plays mp3s, with the volume increasing gradually, you can use the full keyboard to set the time (10 number keys instead of just a pair of up/down arrows) and so much more! It’s easily extensible too.
You just can’t go back!
well i have a media dock for my droid 4 and i have been using that as an alarm clock and connected to my speakers it has one HELL of an alarm (that i need!) and i can just yell “SLEEP” and it will go in to sleep mode
but i can see the potential here …
and i have successfully driven a KS0108 display off 3.3v (with 5vin) without any real problem