“A big and heavy alarm clock made from an old tea can, a big red button and few other parts…
The origin story of this project is a bit unusual. We didn’t really need an alarm clock, but we wanted to try out an OLED screen, some encoders and an MP3 player. The alarm clock seemed to be a perfect little “test drive” project. Oh, and we had a metal tea can and a fancy emergency stop button. Perfect for an industrial look and feel…
This was supposed to be a weekend project but it somehow got stretched a bit… Into almost eight weekends. The main functionality of an alarm clock is trivial - measure time and play an alarm sound when the alarm time is reached. And it wasn’t the main functionality that stretched the project’s duration so much. It was all the small things that make the device actually usable - the enclosure, the knobs, the display, recharging etc. “