Archive for May, 2009
The Idea is Born
Our internal development name
During the final year, all Electrical Engineering students at Northeastern University are required to complete a capstone project. A final senior design, seen as the culmination of five years of education.
We spent most of the Spring coming up with our idea, the self-setting alarm clock. The plan was to design an alarm clock from scratch, with internet connectivity. It would connect to your Google Calendar to determine your first task for the next day, pass it through an algorithm that gathered additional information, and then wake you up at the ideal time. This would be combined with a multitude of inputs and outputs, to wake you up in the way of your choosing.
We settled on a basic feature set consisting of an AVR, LCD, X10, iPod playback and control, FM Radio, and Wi-Fi connectivity to a remote server to do the heavy lifting.
Our internal development name would be the iSac.