Power Budget

The original specification for the MP3 alarm clock stated that the project should be portable. Thus, it should run on batteries if necessary, so the current draw and drain on resources needs to be considered. Here is a summary of the current draw in the key operating modes:

If one considers that a typical alkaline AA battery is rated at 2500 mAh and four AA batteries are placed in series to power the alarm clock, this means that battery power would last 15.5 hours. While this is decent, a much longer amount of run time would be ideal for a portable alarm clock.

For a more detailed analysis of the power budget, check out the Power Budget Spreadsheet.