If you don’t have a 9-to-5 type of job you might find yourself constantly resetting your alarm clock as your calendar commitments change. [Lucas] finally got fed up with the nightly ritual and decided to build his own alarm clock which has unique settings for each day of the week (translated).

The display itself is an LM044L 20×4 character display. This provides a viewing area that is about 3″x1″ and since it’s an HD44780 compliant LCD screen, writing data to it takes very little effort (and RAM) compared to a graphic LCD. A pic 18F2550 drives the device, taking input from a half-dozen buttons, driving the display, and turning on the enclosed buzzer when it’s time to get up. There’s a backup battery which will keep the settings when power is lost. The daily alarms, current time, and back light brightness can all be adjusted from the four screens that make up the settings menus. The only thing that it’s missing is a precision timekeeper, but that should be easy to add either by measuring the frequency of the mains or by using an RTC chip.

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