g5 alarm clock
posted Mar 5th 2005 10:35am by Jason Striegelfiled under: macs hacks
a couple of days ago, an engadget reader posed an important question:
Does a non-fugly cd-alarm clock exist? It is the Holy Grail of gadgets. How Sony can make a gorgeous T1 or T3 digital camera and still make clocks that look like ass confounds me.
now there is hope for fugly alarm clock haters. anders lundberg has solved your problem and built an alarm clock into a mac g5 case.
the howto is written in swedish, but it’s also well documented in the universal language of jpeg. it looks like he was able to create a custom led array that fits the hole pattern of the case, while using the guts from an every day alarm clock to drive it all. thanks for the link, gary!
update: a reader over at tuaw has translated the howto to english
Oh Man this is simple but it leads to some seriously good ideas for hack combinations.
Perhaps use this to display the temp inside (would require special link).
The best? A small basic pic programed system to wake you after not responding to the alarm.
Wire the pic input into the speeker. Detect the pulse from the clock. Set a timeout. Create boot. Have crontab job ready for setting voulume high and itunes ready. It trips on the system and blows you out of bed.
If you want a nicer system add a wire to turn on the coffee pot and the warmer or just add in the http://masterbootrecord.de/english/coffee_howto.php
system (hey unix base, usb, combine = tomorrows hack. cant be that hard ;).
((My computer cop/limiter would set it for midnight to remind me to go to bed))