Sunbar
The SunBar is light alarm, following my development of light-based alarms which I have found to be quite effective in establishing a set routine of waking up early. The earlier versions were based off: a breadboarded circuit, a protoboard circuit with an ATTiny85, and an Arduino Shield.
![](https://westsideelectronics.com/content/images/2019/02/IMG_0304.jpg)
The protoboard version was designed to take 12V and regulate it down to 5V for the ATTiny85. A N-Channel Mosfet was used to control the brightness of the LED strip.
This new version is designed to be as compact as possible, and fit within a case. I found that the adhesive on the backs of the LED strips to be poor at best, and they usually fell off after about two weeks or so. However, I continued to use it because it was still effective, even as a heap at the bottom of the window.
One back-end change to the design is that it is all made in KiCad, which makes modelling particularly enjoyable because it generates a 3D model of the PCB and components. While KiCad itself has a limited selection of 3D models compared to the footprints available, I found GrabCad to be an excellent resource in closing the gap. The model can also be exported as a Step file, which can then be read by other 3D modelling software like Solidworks.
![](https://westsideelectronics.com/content/images/2019/02/image.png)
Another big change is that the microcontroller is now an STM32 part instead of an Atmel part. I really enjoy programming with STM32 and the cheapest part, the STM32F030F4P6, comes in a nice, hobbyist friendly TSSOP package. I noticed that STM tends to favor TQFP designs rather than the harder-to-solder parts like QFN or BGA chips which have leads under the package, so it might be a good choice if you do a lot of assembly yourself. Because I have always assembled my boards by hand, and the time saved in soldering exposed pins is quite considerable.
Version 1
Version 1 used the STM32F030C8T6 chip, which is a 48 pin QFP package. A lot of pins were left unused. However, because of a mistake in wiring the programming headers, despite repeated attempts at a white wire fix, the chip could not be programmed so testing moved on to the FDD8780 N-channel MOSFET. It was found that the wiring was correct and the behavior of the LEDs was as expected.
Version 2
Version 2 uses the cheapest chip available as an STM32 part. The STM32F030F4P6 chip is a TSSOP part with 20 pins.