Xronos update: Final (hopefully) phase

Yet another update about Xronos Clock project.  I have received faceplate from Pololu and I’m pretty happy with how it came out.  I had high hopes on mirrored one, but actually brushed aluminum (w/ black core) faceplate came out a lot better, so I’m sticking with that material for now.  I didn’t have chance to take any new pictures yet, but believe me it looks hot 🙂

I spent most of the time finalizing code and added tons of “features” that should’ve been there form the beginning. Things like vocal announcement of day of week and alarm settings.  Big one was addition of custom alarm. Now both alarms can be set to any day of week. At some point I ran out of RAM (again!).   Fortunately getting rid of most “Serial.print” commands or replacing them with more efficient once, gave me back close to 600 bytes (which is a lot). I had no idea how inefficient Serial.print is in Arduino IDE.  Speak of memory, I replaced all sprintf functions with safe version (snprintf) and made correct size arrays so I no longer have overrun buffers.

I think I’m pretty much done with code and hope it doesn’t have any major bugs in it.  I also sent PCBs for fabbing at iTead (they are 10x cheaper than OSH Park) and they already shipping it back.  New order with Pololu has also been placed for what I hope will be final prototype of the enclosure.

Time to start working on xronsoclock.com website. As soon as I have blog running there, I’ll stop posting these updates ClickGlide 🙂

Have a nice weekend and happy March 8th!