eReminder



In today's busy and hectic lifestyle with load of enhanced responsibilities, it is quite natural to forget many important works and appointments daily. This is more critical as age factor come into picture. In the evening after returning from office it happened almost with everybody to forget more than 40% of essential things to do. If you want to get rid of this, than only option is to prepare a list of "Things to do today" daily and carry with you, even then you missed some activities because you were busy with something else at that time. When IT revolution is passing near by, then why not search some alternative solution for this problem? In search of answer to this question, I finally end up with this project named as "eReminder". In this project a big prototype to demonstrate the implementation of idea is developed using revolutionary microcontroller from ZiLOG i.e Z8Encore! Z8F6401. Later using SMD components this can be made as a pocket calculator size small gadget or the technology can be embedded in existing mobile phones or calculators with more features. User can carry "eReminder" in his pocket and can get rid of forgetting even a single task. The eReminder can be programmed to generate an alert at specified time with message flashing on LCD to remind of the task at that time. In the present implementation a Keypad is used to store alerts and set clock. This can be further relaxed by developing a user interface program, which can run on PC and transfer the alerts from organizer software using IrDA transceivers to eReminder. The hardware core of the eReminder is ZiLOG's Z8F6401 microcontroller and Dallas Semiconductor's Real Time Clock (RTC) with 4kB SRAM DS17487. The complete circuit is designed around them with a 3x4 matrix keypad, a 16x2 alphanumeric LCD, and a speaker. Plans were to play a user selected musical ring tone at time of alert rather than a simple tone, but it's implementation is left as a future extension due to lack of time.