The project which we are presenting is not the project we presented in our proposal. We initially planned to build a WWVB time-code receiver, which would demodulate a 60 kHz signal and extract an extremely precise time according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Unfortunately, due to a weak signal and noise interference, we decided that a time-code receiver would not be feasible to build. Instead we chose to design our project around a laptop hard drive that Richard had in his possesion. After studying the capabilities of the hard drive, we decided to build a hard drive based microcontroller programmer.

The basic function of the microcontroller programmer is to allow a user to select between several ROM files stored on the hard drive and then program the selected ROM file into a target MCU. Design of the programmer would incorporate features of microcontroller-based design such as serial communication and the use of LCDs as seen in lecture, as well as new concepts such as reading from a FAT32 partitioned hard drive.