XRONOS Clock update 1/18/2013

Clock has been “ticking” without any major issues this past week. I started to work on code modification and added important feature to alarm functionality which now escalates volume gradually so it doesn’t give you heart attack in the morning 🙂 I also added lowest possible dimming setting for Night mode, however it’s still too bright in the dark room. Hopefully darker acrylic will take care of that issue.

Speaking of acrylic, I made changes to the new enclosure and ordered it laser cut form Pololu. Unfortunately they don’t carry 1/4″ grey acrylic so I had to order material at another store and have it shipped to Pololu.  Since I was ordering that, I also added order for DollyShield enclosure (fixed wrong dimensions). Bundling many things to same order really slashed pricing, I’m super happy about that.

There were several issues with the clock that I discovered. One was bug in the code that caused clock to reset under certain condition. Fortunately I fixed it for good.  However there’s something strange happening to temperature readings. It fluctuates by about 2-3 degrees, which is a lot. I don’t know if it’s change to the code (I now round off temperature to whole number) or something with electrical. Going to work on that more.  Most worrying issue was with DC jack. After a while it makes bad contact and if clock is moved it looses power 🙁  I hope it’s just power supply’s plug, otherwise it could be bad quality of the jack that I got from tayada electronics, and I will need to find a better quality one…

Last night I finally got a word from OSH Park that they received PCB panels and will be shipping my board shortly!

There’s one more thing I wanted to mention. I currently considering adding IR remote control to the clock. Hopefully code modification is not too difficult and I find a good way to attach IR sensor.

 

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