Vermes
Advanced Member level 4
The main elements of the alarm clock are Atmega8 and PCF8583, which is battery maintained when there is no voltage. The clock has an alarm with a possibility to enter settings from your own keyboard, from IR remote control (SONY, JVC or RC5). It can be also connected with a PC through RS232. Not only you can set the clock and alarms form your PC program, but also sunchronize time with Internet. All that means that this clock is really exact. It is very important for selecting capacitor with PCF.
Morning snooze can be turned on without going to the clock because of the remote control, which can always be in the palm of your hand, even in your bed. Remote control can be also used for adjustment of the display or housing brightness.
The housing was made of a bent piece of plexiglass. It is backlit by RGB diode, what provides several modes of backlight – so you can change colour of the housing or enable a program which makes colours smoothly change, which gives a very interesting effect.
Pictures:
And video:
Picture above shows the program for PC. It has the following functions:
- RGB clock and computer clock synchronization
- synchronization of time in PC with any Internet time server, selected from the list (so the program can be used for synchronization of the PC time even without connecting it to RGB clock)
- alarm setting
- display brightness and housing backlight setting
- setting selected colour of backlight or mode of smoothly changing colours or disabling the backlight
- receiving codes from three kinds of remote controls: RC-5, JVC and SONY and on-line display in the program
- a possibility to assign the appropriate remote control keys to run some Windows applications or turn off the computer
Set parameters are stored in the EEPROM of the processor, so that after configuration, the clock operates in a particular way all the time, without connecting to the PC.
All the parameters are displayed in the program all the time, even if you are in manual mode (keyboard of the clock) of time or alarm setting, or even display brightness adjustment.
The program for the processor was written in Assembler and takes approximately 90% of data memory. The program for the PC was written in Delphi7.
This is the final software of the clock. Here, in the program for the PC, you can assign corresponding actions to keys of the remote control, such as:
- running programs (Media Player, WinAmp)
- increasing or decreasing volume of music
- running or restarting PC
Link to original thread (useful attachment) – Nietypowy zegarek/budzik z pilotem