Devlog 4

I found a lot of errors with my previous design. A lot of things just wouldn’t fit together if I went with the flat design and I just couldn’t figure out a clean way to make it work.

So, I pivoted. I looked online for some cool alarm clock designs and found one I liked. It was kinda pyramid shaped and I hadn’t seen an alarm clock like it. More importantly, it worked with what I already had and didn’t require to many changed to the PCB.

So I started CADing, but ran into another issue. In F360 the shell tool makes a cavity inside a shape that mirrors its outside. So a pyramid shaped hole in a pyramid. But this means that my screws would have to follow the tilt of the pyramid. I tried making it work, but failed. So I restarted and found a way to make just the corners straight (see pictures if this doesn’t make sense) so my screws could go straight in.

Overall, I ran into a bunch of small issues that caused the two CAD restarts, but we got through it. I also added the supports for the PCB but was limited to only 3 so that the display pins still had room.

My next steps are some more design work to make it look nicer, and I need to flip my MCU and buzzer in KiCad, but then I’m done. This honestly took longer than I expected. The CAD took soooo long this time because of tiny mistakes or oversights I made in the past.