Press for Time Process

Midterm: Press for Time

For this project, I was inspired by how frustrating it can be to set the clock on a microwave or oven. I find it is usually an unexpected combination of pressing and holding certain buttons and can never remember how to do it a few months later when it’s daylight savings again.

Press for Time is a purposefully difficult microwave clock to set. If you manage to set the correct time, the clock blinks a few times and then resets to zero.

Things I did / used / experimented with:

rotary encoder
RTC (thank you Jess!)
soldering
heat shrinking
interface design????
using a bunch of buttons
linear potentiometer

I started by getting a seven segment display to work:

First time working with a rotary encoder

This is the breakdown of what my code is doing:

- RTC keeps time (current time displayed on serial monitor)
- Constantly check if the time on the display matches with the real time.
- If the time matches up, blink 3 times and then reset.

me testing something - i don't remember what

Interface design
Like all fabrication projects, this took waaaay longer than expected. This was my first time making a physical interface for buttons/sliders/etc, so there was a lot of measuring / cutting / measuring again going on. I had only a small sheet of acrylic to work with, so instead of making a whole box like I wanted to, I just made the front panel.

The first one had too many buttons too close together.

Experimenting with adding key caps to the buttons.

I engraved button-sized circles on onto the backs of each button so they'd sit easily on the button.

Diagram of what each button does. The top two buttons don’t do anything.

Future iteration:

sound
build an actual box & mount it on the wall
figure out the RTC & fix related code
secure wires / buttons / etc
keycaps