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Casing : the front

The student makerspace opened at my University. I wanted to try it out !

For the case, I found some wooden tissue box that would fit my needs. Actually it's a bit big, but better safe than sorry. The thing is, the cut in the middle is super handy to start cutting with a jigsaw.

So I started working my little front panel for my alarm clock. First, I made a model on Solidworks, just to see what it would look like.

Modelling helps having clear ideas !
For the front panel, there is four cuts, made from the middle cut that was originally present on the box (to let the tissues go out).
  • 2 circular holes for the speakers,
  • 1 big rectangular hole for the LCD screen,
  • 1 smaller rectandular hole for the clock.
Sadly, my 7-segments display never came, I guess it got lost, so I'll have to deal with the seller to try to have them send it again. :(

For the moment, I didn't do any cuts for the buttons, but they will surely be on the top side of the box. This is because, when you want to press a button, you don't want the hold the box to press it. If you put it on top, you will be able to push it normally, simply because the box is put on the opposite side.

So I entered so tiny but nice workshop...

Tools !
I have simple dreams that are easily fulfilled



So, it's small, but there's common tooling, which is nice.

In order to cut the rectangular holes, I first drilled little holes with a drill in the corners, so that I can put the blade of the jigsaw and cut straight. This results in dirty big holes in the corner, but I couldn't figure out how to do otherwise... so I guess I'll live with it !

I did my best to cut circles with a heavy jigsaw if my piece of agglomerate wood... Could have been worse !!!

Looking good !


Then, I put the speakers in the dedicated holes, and I tried to put the screen with clothing pins, just to see how it would look like... and it's rather nice ! I will be able to screw the screen, there's little holes in it, and I have some screws for wood that can definitely do the job.

But what's really nice is the sound ! Definitely, wood is the best !



For next time, I definitely need to figure out how the UI should look like, to define what kind of buttons I need. I already did some coding to rewrite my screen functions, they're much better, as you may see. And I need to implement some flash storage of a few variables, namely the alarm time ! I want it to be preserved between reboots, of course. (For the current time, I don't care, I get it with the Karadio thanks to NTP.)

Next time, I'll probably show more about code !
See you !

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