When I left my previous job around 18 months ago, I promised myself I’d do something productive with the time I had between employment. During that time, I realised how much I hated my alarm clock going off every morning, and also how stupid and inflexible most alarm clocks are. I managed to achieve very little with that spare time between jobs, but this hatred of alarm clocks has been driven home even further since I’ve started working shifts in my new job – no alarm clock I could find had the ability to vary the alarm time based on a shift pattern (I suppose that’s a fairly niche feature!), and very few had decent internet radio connectivity to allow me to listen to music I like in the morning.
That productive feeling drew me to buy some parts from Adafruit and have a play with some electronics projects – the furthest I got was playing around with a LCD display as documented in this other blog post. More recently, my old alarm clock started to fail in rather interesting ways (ever been woken up at 3:27AM by a piercing screaming & static noise?), so I decided it was time to build my own, and the AlarmPi was born!
The core of the project is a Raspberry Pi connected up to a series of fairly basic components, all controlled by a Python script which takes input from all manner of sources, and shows information through the two front displays. I’ve put together a short video explaining some of the main features which can be viewed below, and you can read more about the AlarmPi on the project page
Hi,
Could You share electronic schema how this all thinks are connected to raspberry?
G.
I’ve updated the project page at http://mattdyson.org/projects/alarmpi with a rough diagram of how it’s all wired together – enjoy!
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Where is CallendarCredentials.py? Where is Calendar.py?
this is cool! props!
Hi Matt
Great project, am thinking of building a similar one. I was wondering whether you got any further with the sunrise alarm light function you mention? As this is something I would like to include, if not I include a link below to one that someone else made which may be of use, also I wanted to build in a couple of haptic disc motors on mine as vibration alarms for under the pillow (or something similar) and wondered if you had any thoughts on how to do so? My background is very much beginner enthusiast so my python/php/(insert other relevant programming language here) any tips or thoughts?
Thanks
Will
Hi Will,
Unfortunately I never got round to the sunrise light, it’s definitely still on the list of future additions though. I’d probably go about it by interfacing with some smart lighting, rather than adding any additional hardware to the clock itself. Same for the vibration alarm – I’d be tempted to build something entirely separate and have the clock switch on the motors via a HTTP request or similar.
Best advice I can give is to get stuck in and give it a go! My first language was PHP, I taught myself that by immersing myself into various projects – there are enough resources around for languages like PHP/Python/JavaScript that you should be able to help yourself through Google searches!
Good luck, please post back with the results!