An intuitive, adaptive, and delightful touchscreen alarm clock.
Easy to see with uncorrected vision, and easy to set with confidence, even when tired.
An open hardware work-in-progress.
Powered by Arduino, curiosity, and ignorance.
This is a journal of the design and prototyping process, starting with a February 2012 rant about what I dislike about every alarm clock I’ve met. I didn’t know much about electronics, but that hasn’t stopped me yet!
My discoveries are recorded here, for the benefit of present and future Citizens of the Makerverse.
Could this be the chronometrist’s ultimate timepiece, the peak of horological haute couture? British bespoke movement maker Hoptroff today claimed to have produced the world’s first personal chronometer with an on board atomic clock.
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Inside the case, Hoptroff has crammed a lithium-polymer battery fed through a micro USB port. It has also built in a Bluetooth radio, plus humidity, temperature and pressure sensors, and even a magnetometer – all of which help drive the 28 dials that make up the watch’s face.
I really enjoyed my pebble (too bad caller ID is not working, yet), and i’m very happy to have been one the sponsors of the “rise of the smartwatch” series.
pair this brand new gadget with my interests in home automation, add the release of the pebble sdk, stir it with some juicy python examples, and there you are: a smarthomewatch!
first things first.
to start you need to have a working libpebble setup. i followed the pretty clear readme of this github homepage.
i followed the advice of using the lightblue library as the wrapper around bluetooth stack: looks pretty outdated, but works even on my up-to-date mountain lion powerbook.
if this is your case, before trying to use the libpebble scripts, follow the instructions you can find here. (that’s a fork adapted to run on macos 10.8)
let’s glue them together … and the first smarthomewatch was born! to avoid having to set up a specific application i used the “music” menu, putting my relay list as if it was a playlist, using the play/pause button as a relay toggle.
the code i’m posting is pretty draft, looking more like a hack of the original file, rather than a proper software module. but hey: it works! …
A year ago Super Awesome Sylvia demoed MarioChron for the Adafruit MonoChron dekstop clock kit. It’s really neat — once per minute Mario hits the box and receives a coin, so his score is equal to the time. Now thanks to the GPL license on the code, you can carry it on your wrist with the port of MarioChron to the Pebble Smart Watch.
DaTajm is a wristwatch based on a PIC16F1824 powered by a single CR1216 lithium coin cell. I’m using a sandwich of three PCBs. The topmost pcb (0.8mm thick) have 12 leds and a resistive touchpad on the top side and all the other parts on the bottom. The middle pcb (1.6mm( is just a spacer for the battery. The bottom pcb have a contact for the positive pole of the battery and a soldered cable up to the top pcb.
When I original wrote the clock’s firmware, it took about 7 seconds to generate a QR code. Of course, this was without refreshing the display. The display needs to be refreshed at least two dozen times a second, and these interruptions extended the QR generation time to around 40 seconds.
This was far too long to generate a QR code every second, but it could definitely update once a minute which is all that was absolutely necessary for a clock. I’ve never done something so computationally intensive on an AVR before, so I just assumed that 45 seconds was a reasonable amount of time. While it would have been nice to update every second, I was amazed I got it to work at all.
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Regardless of the fact that my clock doesn’t meet the guidelines for border thickness, he linked to a library that was supposedly able to generate a QR code in less than a second. This got me thinking that it might be worth trying to optimize my code before resigning to a once a minute update.
With my shipment date just around the corner, I thought it’d be fun to discuss what I discovered.
What time is it? It’s time to #MakeAwesomeHappen and learn to program the new Pebble Smart Watch! We’ll be teaching a three hour class on 18 May on how to write custom watch faces that work with the official Pebble SDK. The programming environment is low-level C, with no memory protection, and no emulator nor a debugger, so you’ll need to be fairly comfortable with writing embedded code or at least not afraid to debug with printf()*. If you’ve programmed a device like an Arduino you should be ok with the class. Tickets for the class are on sale for $125. The hackathon afterwards is free!
The Memento Mori installation consists of a 4 digit LED display, which is mounted between the teeth of a casted human skull and connected to a highly accurate rubidium atomic clock. The display visualizes the passage of time by repeatedly counting down one second in millisecond-steps (from 1.000 to .001).
By utilizing atomic clocks, we can determine with unimaginable accuracy how quickly the irretrievable essence of our lives is decreasing, how fast the ultimate yet unknown point in time of our death is approaching – millisecond by millisecond. This Memento Mori is not only an ironic reminder of our own mortality but a reflection of the values we are striving for. Despite all the hyper-accurate technology inhabiting our lives the haunting question of “When?” still remains unanswered.
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Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
The crew over at MakerBot shared some more designs for the three DIY electronics kits we included in the MakerBot Adafruit Edition, and we have been having fun printing these out in-house ourselves!
A few days ago we and our good friends over at Adafruit announced a limited Adafruit edition of the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer available for sale. The whole batch sold out in 33 hours.
As others have pointed out, this makes total sense. Adafruit customers are total DIY heroes who would naturally want to make their own customized enclosures and components. You know what’s perfect for doing that? A MakerBot.
Right now you can pick up three of Adafruit’s most popular kits at the MakerBot Store in NYC: TIMESQUARE, RasPi, and MintyBoost. To sweeten the deal, we’ve launched our own special designs for the enclosures for these three kits, seen in the photo above, on our own Thingiverse page.
Here’s a great project shared on the Adafruit Forums! The final stages of completing an Arduino-powered real time Clock. And check out the great 3D printed case! From Open Clock Project.
One year later: a fully functional working prototype is complete!
The Waveshield memory constraint was solved by tricking the code into using a smaller buffer size. Diagnosis and helpful discussion on the topic with the good folks at Adafruit.
The code still needs some improvement, notably a way to “snooze” the alarm. And perhaps some devious trick to prevent a sleepy user from turning it off (a math test, perhaps!). And I need to work a bit more on the enclosure, to make it easier to build without a 3D printer.
But that’s just icing. My bad old alarm clock has now been officially retired!
TIMESQUARE DIY Watch Kit – Tangerine Display Matrix: Show up stylish AND on time to any event with this awesome looking DIY watch. We have a few watch kits here at Adafruit but we finally have one that looks good and fits well, even for ladies and kids and others with smaller wrists and hands. Its got a 8×8 bit matrix display and a repurposed silicone watch band for a professional look. (read more)
Adam Wishneusky built the Adafruit Time Square Watch kit and approves!
I soldered the components for this watch All By Myself like a big boy. It was fun!
Show up stylish AND on time to any event with this awesome looking DIY watch. We have a few watch kits here at Adafruit but we finally have one that looks good and fits well, even for ladies and kids and others with smaller wrists and hands. Its got a 8×8 bit matrix display and a repurposed silicone watch band for a professional look.
After the success and popularity of my original QR Clock, I decided it might be a fun challenge to redesign the clock into a more attractive and lower-cost form factor. The end goal is to make this the flagship product that gets my Ch00ftech Store on its feet. Before I could start worrying about manufacturing and shipping, I needed a new prototype, so this post is to tell you about what I’ve changed.
I addressed a number of mechanical and electrical problems that I had with the original design, but this time around, I’ve also addressed some of the pricing and supply chain issues I had before. This clock is actually much cheaper to make than the original, and getting it that way involved some new experiences for me.
Trammell Hudson writes in about the TIMESQUARE watch class he held at NYC Resistor:
We had a great class yesterday. Four of the students had never soldered before, but the kits went together really easily and all eight worked on the first try. We took a little longer on the assembly than I had expected — 2.5 hours instead of 1.5 — and as a result the software portion was a little bit shorter than I had planned. Everyone successfully compiled and re-flashed their watches using the arduino IDE and the FTDI friend, so they should be in good shape for experimenting with them.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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