Rick Crispo

Made an FM Stereo Alarm Clock with an 8-bit RISC Microcontroller Board. 

     -Given the hardware, datasheets, skeleton code and class lectures, completed a 10-week lab oriented class to implement an alarm clock.

      - I liked the course so much that I volunteered to become the Teaching Assistant the following year.

 

Wrote C code with GCC tools running on the Linux Ubuntu Operating System and a USB programmer.

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The embedded system features:

• A software debounce routine used with the pushbutton interface. 

• The TWI protocol (I2C) to interface the microcontroller with a room temperature sensor chip.  Also, an outdoor temperature sensor is programmed to communicate via TWI over UART so that a long distance wire can be used. 

• A circuit with an encoder knob to set the time, which interfaces to the main program via the SPI protocol. 

• A bi-directional level shifter to interface the 5V microcontroller with a 3.3V FM/AM receiver chip.  The two chips communicate with the TWI protocol (the SDA and SCL lines are level shifted).

• An LCD screen that is used as part of a user interface.  

• A dimmer circuit that adjusts the luminosity of an LED display according to how bright the room is.

• An external crystal for a timer counter frequency input, which is separate from the main microcontroller clock.