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Prometheus Version 2 Complete

A project log for Prometheus Alarm Clock

Possessing both the beauty of the bygone analog age and the convenience of cutting edge tech, Prometheus is the ultimate alarm clock!

andrew-leeAndrew Lee 01/08/2018 at 07:580 Comments

First, I wanted to thank you for your interest in this project.

Over the course of the last few months, I finished soldering and drilling arbitrarily into components and wood until I was able to upgrade Prometheus to be a single piece wooden enclosed system.

In addition to this, I also added racing toggle switches to independently control the circuits for the nixie displays, the Raspberry Pi (running my alarm program), and the bed shaker.

The sound output now relies on a HifiBerry Digi+ Pro sound card to output high quality S/PDIF digital output via I2C the sound port on the Raspberry Pi. In addition to playing the alarm sound, I am using the Pi as a AirPlay media server (using shairport-sync).

Because the NCS314 clock came with a super inaccurate RTC module, I decided to send the correct time from the Pi (which gets accurate time via NTP) via serial USB. Since the wooden enclosure I used was too narrow to plug-in the standard Arduino USB and power supply, I soldered those wires directly underneath the Arduino.

Furthermore, I made further improvements to the Web UI to make it super stable and added some new features. First of all, I separated the UI into tabs (Home and Settings), so that there is less clutter. The user now also has the ability to change the LED colors of the clock directly from the UI. Furthermore, I added some extra bells and whistles which are as follows:

-Ability to notify the user about an IP change (via email) so that the user doesn't have to physically connect a keyboard and a screen to the Pi just to get the new IP address when the IP gets changed by the DHCP server

-Ability to control the sound playing function to accomodate for a custom sound card

-An about page that lists how to use the front-end UI to set the alarms.

Finally, I took alot of time to overhaul and improve the build instructions on my wiki so that anyone who wants to implement this project can have the resources they need to get started.

The only thing I can really think of to improve this project is to 3D print the letters "Prometheus" and attach it to the front of the clock.

However, I believe the this project has succeeded in all of the core goals I envisioned in its inception and will forever be one of my favorite devices that I own. I learned so much from this project, and I am grateful for all of the people that helped me along the way. From this point, I will only update the pictures of the clock (once I get the 3D printed name on the clock). Any other updates can be found on Github.

Again, please feel free to contact me if you have trouble making a similar system (after looking at the set-up instructions located at my wiki.

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