today the only time i had to code was when i got home at around 10 but now I am here and I decided to get on my computer to work on the firmware for my alarm clock. since i don’t have an esp32 yet or the actual display, i decided to go with good ol serial print and use my arduino mega to debug the components i had at hand.

i wired a rotary encoder to the arduino mega and had to lookup the pinout for it but it was sort of similar to the one i had in my PCB schematic. it was pretty fun once i uploaded the code because i was able to see the values go crazy in the serial monitor. then i i figured out a basic way to make the current time comparing millis to the last millis and then adding a second and boom we have time which i will use to compare to the alarm time. the position in the rotary encoder will be used to add/subtract when setting alarm/current time. i am very glad i got this out of the way!