Snowman Clock

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  The countdown timer for the snowman clock

Inspiration

The inspiration behind our project is that the the team has discovered that university students are calling for a better machine to help them with time management. As a result, the team come up with the idea to design a tool that can count down from amount of time of the users' choices and display how the time has passed through visualization.

What it does

It counts down from a time of the users' choice on one LCD screen and display how the time has passed through visualization on another LCD screen. When it counts down to zero, a snowman will show up in the middle of the LCD screen to tell the user that it's time to have a rest!

How we built it

The team has built the whole model on Arduino Uno, with additional LCD displays. Various libraries related to displaying and timing has been used to facilitate counting down as well as display. The "stop and continue" feature of the count down timer is enabled by a push button.

Challenges we ran into

The team originally plan to having the counting down on a 4-digit 7 segment display, which requires at least 11 digit-read pins. During hardware assembly, the team has realized that the number of pins on the Arduino Board is not enough for all connections, which is where the next step of the project will be focusing on. The team will also work on the display of the real time, which does not functional well during the limited time boundary.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

SNOWMAN!!!!! We are very proud of the snowman display screen when counting down to zero. The smile of the snowman has brought the team a lot of joy and is believed to be able to bring a lot of joy to the users too. We are also proud of the pushbutton we have implemented so that the counting down timer can be stopped at any time we want. We have also implemented a button(left) that can help the LCD to shift mode between real time and counting down, which remain to be further improved.

What we learned

During this tour, we have learned how to program the Arduino and linking the hardware. We have practiced applying the knowledge learned in digital hardware system to real life projects. And most importantly, we have learned how to teamwork, resolve emergencies and present the best we can do during a limited amount of time.

What's next for Snowman Clock

For our next step, we plan to improve on the real time display functionality on the LCD screen. At the same time, we also plan to implement more features for our design such as audio display or LED lighting when the counting down is finished.

Built With

• arduino