yet another one finished

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kltalsma
 
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yet another one finished

Post by kltalsma »

Hi,

Just finished my kit after recieving the missing C8/C9 capacitators. really good service (could have gotten them here in the netherlands) and its now up and running

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some things i noticed.

- I did find the brightness a bit much, even with the setting on 30 it still lit up the room.
- after connecting the power supply i need to cycle through all menu options to stop the display blinking.

i did not find any faults in the soldering at this point. I've read about random resetting and will check later on if i'm able to find something.

Had great fun soldering & assembling the kit.

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len17
 
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Re: yet another one finished

Post by len17 »

kltalsma wrote:- I did find the brightness a bit much, even with the setting on 30 it still lit up the room.
You mean at night, right? I find it's a little bit bright but it only lights up the near end of the pillow. :)
- after connecting the power supply i need to cycle through all menu options to stop the display blinking.
You only need to press the menu button twice, so it displays "set time". Then after a few seconds it will return to the time display with no blinking.
I've read about random resetting and will check later on if i'm able to find something.
If you have problems with the clock resetting when you press the buttons, there's a firmware fix for that. Search this forum. You'll need an AVR programmer (e.g. USBtinyISP) to update the firmware.

kltalsma
 
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Re: yet another one finished

Post by kltalsma »

Len17 wrote:
kltalsma wrote:- I did find the brightness a bit much, even with the setting on 30 it still lit up the room.
You mean at night, right? I find it's a little bit bright but it only lights up the near end of the pillow. :)
Correct this was at night. Still found it bright enough to see most of the room and brighter compared to my other alarm clock.
I suppose 30 is the lowest setting?, how about the auto dimming function? would that be make a difference?

Len17 wrote:
Klaas wrote: - after connecting the power supply i need to cycle through all menu options to stop the display blinking.
You only need to press the menu button twice, so it displays "set time". Then after a few seconds it will return to the time display with no blinking.
So this works as designed?
Len17 wrote:
Klaas wrote:I've read about random resetting and will check later on if i'm able to find something.
If you have problems with the clock resetting when you press the buttons, there's a firmware fix for that. Search this forum. You'll need an AVR programmer (e.g. USBtinyISP) to update the firmware.
At this time i do not "yet" have an USBtinyISP so i'll leave it. Did some testing with changing settings and did not experience the problem at that time. It's not a big issue.

Even if i will be using the clock as my actual alarm clock there's not much need to adjust settings often. wake up will still be at 04.30.

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len17
 
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Re: yet another one finished

Post by len17 »

kltalsma wrote:Correct this was at night. Still found it bright enough to see most of the room and brighter compared to my other alarm clock.
I suppose 30 is the lowest setting?, how about the auto dimming function? would that be make a difference?
My auto-dimming code uses the same minimum brightness (30). I don't know if you can make it dimmer than that - will the tube still light up?
kltalsma wrote:
Len17 wrote:You only need to press the menu button twice, so it displays "set time". Then after a few seconds it will return to the time display with no blinking.
So this works as designed?
Yes, the blinking is to remind you to set the time. But now that you mention it, the battery backup makes this feature seem unnecessary. Maybe I'll remove it from my clock.

adafruit
 
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Re: yet another one finished

Post by adafruit »

the clock is too stupid to know whether the battery was removed - sadly - so it blinks to let you know when power was lost

jsgf
 
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Re: yet another one finished

Post by jsgf »

adafruit wrote:the clock is too stupid to know whether the battery was removed - sadly - so it blinks to let you know when power was lost
That's not quite true. You can check MCUSR to see if main() was called as a result of a MCU reset or not. If it wasn't, then it was the result of a call to app_start() as a result of a power source switch, and you can clear timeunknown (you should also avoid resetting TCNT2 to stop the loss of up to a second).

I've implemented this in my firmware. Seems to work fine.

adafruit
 
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Re: yet another one finished

Post by adafruit »

there was an issue, it was inconsistent for some reason. cant remember now...

jsgf
 
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Re: yet another one finished

Post by jsgf »

adafruit wrote:there was an issue, it was inconsistent for some reason. cant remember now...
Hm. I thought about it for a while and couldn't see any loopholes. And even if it did fail in some rare circumstance, it didn't seem like the end of the world; for the most part it will end up flashing if it isn't sure it knows the user-set time (which may or may not be correct, of course...).

jsgf
 
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Re: yet another one finished

Post by jsgf »

jsgf wrote:I thought about it for a while and couldn't see any loopholes...
We had a power outage this afternoon, so I got to see if the battery backup worked in practice... and it didn't. The clock's time stopped advancing, and wouldn't resume once power started; in fact it needed a reset from the programmer before going again.

I guess, for some reason, tc2 needs to be set up again...

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