Sunshine Alarm

Objective

For my first senior project, unlike most students, I created something that I could use in my day to day life. I often wake up before the sun rises to get a head start on the day, but found myself having a tough time getting out of bed. I knew if I could wake more naturally I would have a better day. So I decided to make a light alarm clock.


Materials

The alarm’s core components consisted of the following:

  • A personally developed PCB

  • A 40 pin PIC microprocessor

  • A RTC

  • A LCD display

  • Multiple buttons and potentiometers for user’s input

  • A very bright LED

Full Bill of Materials for the project:


Accomplishments

Through this project I was able to accomplish:

  1. Creating a custom PCB in Altium

  2. Setting up a multiple state embedded processor

  3. Writing a I2C library for the PIC

  4. Accessing register information from a RTC

  5. Displaying current state information on LCD

  6. Controling LED brightness with pulse width modulation

  7. Power regulation through a LDO and capacitors

  8. Powering a semi “high” current LED through a power mosfet

  9. Using ADCs to read potentiometers (selectors)

  10. Using a DAC to conrtol brightness of LCD

  11. Using interrupts to receive button presses

PCB design and layer pours

If you would like to check out the detailed project report or source code please check out my github repository.

Thanks,
James


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