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

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I started by getting a seven segment display to work: 



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.


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.


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