Da Clock

Inspiration

Allen's roommate has a hard time waking up in the morning so we wanted to build something to help him out. Natural sun light is one of the best ways to wake up and maintain a healthy sleep schedule, that is why we wanted to incorporate a blinds opening system in out design.

What it does

DaClock is an alarm clock with a built in blinds opener. You set up the alarm when you want to wake up in the morning. When it is that time, the buzzer wakes you up and the stepper-motor starts spinning. The motor is attached to a 3D-printed pulley wheel which opens the blinds. To make the alarm stop you have to scan your RFID. At night when its dark, the photoresistor detects that and the motor starts spinning the other way to close the blinds.

How we built it

We used a LCD screen to display the time. The buzzer is connected to the Arduino and when the time is the same as the set alarm the buzzer generates noise. The motor is also connected to a motor driver module which is connected to the Arduino. At this time the motor, attached to a pulley wheel, spins and opens the blinds. To stope the buzzer the user must tap their RFID card. The clock also has a photoresistor which points outside the window and is used to detect when it gets dark. To get the clock to look a little nicer we laser cut a box where we mounted the LCD screen and RFID reader to the front, and we cut holes in the back for the motor, power supply, and the photoresistor.

Challenges we ran into

First we were going to build is with a number pad and the used had to answer a math question to stope the alarm. However the number pad was too sensitive and would input numbers even when nothing was pressed. So we decided to use IOT to implement the number pad and the user had to log in into their computer to answer the math question. However, we could not get the Arduino connect with the computer and read the input. Other challenges we faced were that we ran out of digital pins in the Arduino and could not get the analog pins to work as digital ones. Also the motor could not get enough power to spin. To solve these problems we used a second Arduino that was just connected to the motor. A last challenge we faced was that there was not enough tension in the ball chain to open the blinds. We taped the pulley to the wall but the mechanism was still kind of wobbly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Waking up can be hard so we are proud of that DaClock can make that process a bit easier and hopefully make the start of your day better. We wanted to make something useful in the day to day life and we believe we achieved that with DaClock.

What we learned

We learned that it takes a lot of work to make a working prototype of a cool electronic project. We also learned how to use a stepper motor and got better at used electronic components that we used in class before like RFID and LCD.

What's next for Da Clock

If we were to redo this project again first we would figure out a better way to mount the pulley so there is good tension without having to tape it to the wall. Then we would improve our code so there were less bugs. Lastly we would look for a better number pad so we can implement the original idea where the user had to answer a math question to stop the alarm.

Built With

• 3dprinting
• arduino
• buzzer
• lasercutting
• lcd
• photoresistor
• rfid
• steppermotor