Digitalrooster On Hardware
A Hackable Alarm Clock, Internet Radio and Podcast Player
For quite some time I have been playing around with QT on embedded to learn new stuff. One thing that I really found annoying was that my fancy Internet Radio alarm clock only allowed for a curated list of stations. I could not add my own podcasts. So the idea was to build my own, Open-Source alarm clock.
The learning project turned out quite long project I called DigitalRooster. I am really proud,the quality is good enough that it keeps waking me up reliably since end 2018.
Not only for the material outcome this project is a personal success, also for the learning part. I have learned a lot of new stuff, not only on QT/QML Software or embedded linux with Buildroot. Never before I have designed schematics and layout in electrical CAD (using kicad). I have learned that doing a design is one thing, creating a design for manufacturing is a whole different story. I have selected components, created BOMs, sourced components and PCBs in China, I have PCBs assembled in China, a quite interesting process (which obviously did not work on the first shot).
Designing the housing for 3D-Print on my friends printer was another sub-project that created days of interesting occupation for my free time, in the end again I learned a lot.
I hope other people are interested and join in the effort of creating a cool open source radio. According to squarespace ("A dream is just an idea that doesn’t have a website yet") I need a website for my pet project, done: www.digitalrooster.dev
I even designed an icon / logo in Inkscape - whatever it is called and I think it looks pretty neat:
Even with thousands of defeats on the way it is a real fun project and I think others will also enjoy a hackable alarm clock. I am thinking about having PCBs manufactured an sell them to makers and tinkerers all over the world via tindie.com. I think I will open a side business for that.
If you are interested in the project or the source code you can have a look at www.digitalrooster.dev or the source projects at: