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The Idea is Born
Our internal development name During the final year, all Electrical Engineering students at Northeastern University are required to complete a capstone project. A final senior design, seen as the...
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WiFly Wireless Module
RN-134B Wireless Device Our first task was to bring up the wireless device. We opted to use the RN-134B from Roving Networks. The benefit to this device was that it had a full TCP/IP stack already, and...
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Arduino Development
Arduino Diecimila - Our development platform In order to prototype all future components, we purchased an Arduino development board with an ATMega168. This made it as easy as possible to bring up each...
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Real-Time Clock
ISL1208 Real-Time Clock Once progress began on the wireless, we shifted focus to the core of any alarm clock, the clock mechanism itself. We ended up choosing the Intersil ISL1208 Real-Time Clock. This...
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Controlling the WiFly
Despite the initial configuration of the WiFly being very easy and straight forward, things became much more difficult once we attempted to automate this process with our Arduino. It was not always...
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Audio System
Class AB Audio Amplifier When selecting the audio components, we wanted to go with something that was fairly powerful and clean sounding, to make our device comparable to other sound docks on the...
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LCD Display
6.4" Serial LCD We wanted an LCD display that was large enough to display a time value visible from far away, along with the room to display the additional real-time information we would be downloading...
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Web Interface
Web User Interface We elected to create a service that ran on a remote web server to do the heavy lifting. This service interfaces with all of the various API’s to do the heavy lifting and calculate...
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FM Radio
AR1010 FM Radio We chose to use the AR1010 FM Receiver module for our radio component. Addressable over I2C, we could tune to specific stations or seek at an adjustable sensitivity level. The...
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iPod Controls
iPod Breakout Board After bringing up the FM Radio, the iPod was a walk in the park. We found a wiki site nuxx.net with the protocol reverse engineered, and it was as simple as sending serial strings...
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Prototype Complete
Working prototype on breadboard Once the iPod and FM were working, all of the major hardware components were complete, and all that was left was fine tuning and software. And just in time, as our...
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PCB Arrives
Bare PCB we designed About a week later the boards arrived, ready to be built up. All our pad geometries were spot on, and all the parts we needed made it into the DigiKey order. A few hours of...
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User Interface
LCD home screen showing the most important information Designing the user interface turned out to be a bigger challenge than we initially expected. It became clear that this system we had developed...
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Designing the Enclosure
3D Model from Sketchup We recruited master woodworker Marc Gaertner to design the enclosure for our device. The challenge was providing exact specs from 300 miles away. In order to communicate our...
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Project Complete!
The Final Product Eleven months after having the idea for a self-setting alarm clock with Google Calendar, our project is finally complete. We chose to rename it to DPAC, the Dynamically Programmable...
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Awards and Recognition
Table at the competition We presented our project at Northeastern University’s annual EE Capstone Competition on 4/8/2010. The presentation consisted of a 10 minute presentation to a panel of industry...
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