Howdy folks! I’ve used my Alpha Clock Five as our primary living room clock for many years. Its enormous numbers can be seen from anywhere in the room. :)
After several recent brownouts at the house, I returned from work to a blank display. My first instinct was some form of damage to the electronics, but thanks to the fantastic schematic documentation, I could verify the base electronics were functioning as intended. My next thought was damage to the ATmega, but luckily I could get avrdude to identify the chip. This was all a long and tedious way of saying I needed to reflash the firmware. Again, excellent documentation was needed to get the Arduino build environment, MittyCore, and required libraries sorted out. Lo and behold, the clock came back to life. YAY!
If I ever needed to do this again, I wanted to ensure it was as quick and easy as possible. Having worked with PlatformIO for Arduino-based projects, I decided to fork the project and make the required changes.

Steps:
– Install the VScode/PlatformIO IDE
– Install git and clone the following repo, https://github.com/revnull-src/AlphaClock-PIO
– Open PlatformIO and open the cloned repo as a project
– Click on the PlatformIO icon to reveal the project tasks and select the project for your bootloader’s baud rate
– Click on “Upload”

If you are unfamiliar with PlatformIO, it will automatically download all needed packages and libraries as defined in the platformio.ini file. As Some point, I’ll add a project task to set fuses and burn the bootloader making it a complete turn-key solution for AC5 firmware.

I hope this helps anyone wanting to “easily” compile and install the firmware on their clock.