This is probably a matter of me being stupid and usually the only way for me to get past moments of such stupidity is to ask the stupid question and display my stupidity for all to see. Normally that causes me to find the problem within 5 minutes.

I'm working with a DS1337 in my current project. Everything is working fine communications-wise and I can set and read the time/alarms/etc. just fine.

My problem right now is that in some cases I want to completely disable the alarms. Having read the datasheet, some application notes, and some sample code I haven't found anything that specifically addresses the situation of disabling an alarm completely.

What I've found works is to set the date for the alarm to an impossible value (39h) so that the date never matches and, thus, the alarm is never triggered. Although this works, I'm a little troubled because the datasheet says "Illogical time and date entries result in undefined operation." (page 9 of the datasheet). That section is technically talking about "Clock and Calendar" rather than the alarms, but nevertheless I'm a little worried about setting the alarm to an invalid value.

Does anyone have any "cleaner" solutions to disabling the alarms on the DS1337?

Oh, and setting A2IE/A1IE in the control register is not the solution for me. That disables the interrupt pin but doesn't disable the alarm flags from being set in the RTC's status register. I'm looking to make sure that the alarm flags are never set at all, not just to prevent the INT pin from being asserted.

Regards,
Craig Steiner