Alarm Clock

After much screwing around, I finally got the ST7565 working with the Arduino Due. The wonderful u8glib recently added support for the Due and had preexisting support for the ST7565.

I’ve spent the last several days unsuccessfully trying to get the ST7565 to work with the Arduino Due. I’ve been trying to port ladyada’s ST7565 library to the SAM core without much luck.

Using the ST7565 with Uno and the library works with no issues, as would be expected, so I didn’t fuck up soldering or anything easy to diagnose like that.

One of the things I knew going into this project was that I wanted the alarm clock to be compatible with Arduino. Ideally I’m going to expose as many of the Arduino’s pins on the final product in an accessible way so people can slap on shields and extend the clock to make it better.

This then begs the question: which Arduino? I have both a Uno and a Due. While I like the simplicity, support and cost of the Uno, the Due seems more future proof. My ST7575 already takes up over half the available pins on an Uno, and I haven’t even added any clocks, GPS, wakeup lights or the million or so other things this clock is going to do to it. Plus I’m sure the extra speed on the Due will come in handy. So Due it is.

One of this things I knew I need to learn to build the world’s best alarm clock was how to solder. And I was right: one of the first things I needed to do was solder wires to the ST7565 display I got from adafruit so I could hook it up to the Arduino at the heart of the clock.

Problem 1: I don’t have a soldering iron. Some quick Googling show that there are a lot of cheap soldering irons out there, and that you can probably get away with using them if you’re not doing a ton of work. But everyone seems to agree that the Hakko FX-888 is the best there is.

All current alarm clocks suck. Go look at Amazon and see what I mean. The best appear to be the Sony designs, which look unchanged from mid-90s. Piles of buttons, no auto-setting of time, no modern technology. If you want something built this decade, the best bet is the iHome crap. I’m sure you’ve seen these: the look like they’re designed by a blind man, they only support iPhones and iPods, and still aren’t all that high-tech.