Developing the Alectruino clock - Part 1

Published on 09 Jan 2010. Tagged: Arduino Alectruino Electronics Clock

I have recently returned to a project I began last winter. The project is to design an alarm clock which eases waking up on these dark and dismal winter mornings. The idea is fairly simple. 30 minutes or so before I want to wake up a bank of LEDs will begin to shine simulating the dawn. This will hopefully prime me for the alarm itself. Last winter I had the time working with a DS1307 real-time clock and was able to control the LEDs through an Arduino.

Although I'm keeping the real-time clock I'm switching the LEDs from white to blue light and I'm adding in an LCD to display the time and likely allow programming. So far I have soldered the bank of LEDs up so they are almost ready to go and setup the Arduino to pull the current time from the DS1307 and then display it on the LCD. So far the project is going well. Hopefully this year I'll actually finish it while it is still of some use. When spring comes around I'll let nature do the work.

The code is straightforward and is little more than pulling together code put together by others. Specifically the tutorials for the LiquidCrystal library and this tutorial on interfacing with the DS1307. The code can be viewed here.