Great idea! I’ll certainly build one of these if I ever get to live in a place with snow again.

Posted at 8:15 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by Choscura

That’s interesting. I made something similar to this, but didn’t use an actual alarm clock. It simply set off a reminder on my computer’s surround-sound if school was canceled. Not the most elegant of solutions, but it worked and didn’t require me turning on any bright monitors in the morning.

#/bin/bash
var1=
for (( ; ; ))
do
wget -m -nd http://home1.wane.com/Closings/waneclosings.html
var1=”`grep -i whitko waneclosings.html`”
var2=”`grep -i warsaw waneclosings.html`”
if ["$var1" == "$var2"]; then
echo “sorry, no delays”
sleep 300
else
amarok
dcop amarok player play
echo “$var1$var2″
break
fi
done

Posted at 8:38 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by The N3rd

Great Project, I’ve had a similar (and way simpler) idea when i was in school. I wanted to use a water sensor to measure if there was any rain, (which meant taking public transport instead of my bicycle). the idea was to just interrupt the signal to the speaker of an alarm clock, as long as there is no rain, and close the circuit once there is rain. unfortunately i never even started with the project.

Posted at 8:42 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by nico

this would be great for ski bums if there was a way to tell if it snowed a foot over night and make the alarm clock wake u up even earlier

Posted at 8:47 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by theuke

Nice project, practical and well done. I wish I had thought of this during high school. My college courses almost never get canceled <_<

Posted at 8:51 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by McSquid

pretty cool but I know for sure my highschool never closed, no matter how much snow we got, but besides that what about the list of schools who do no publish their status? private schools? military schools?

Posted at 8:59 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by sunjester

sure 20 years after I get out somebody does this…oh well my kids thank you!The trickiest I evre got was a toaster on a timer(still can’t sleep through the smell of toast toasting)

Posted at 9:16 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by Hacksaw

Great idea, though the instructable’s step of “switch off any power-saving options Windows has” kinda sucks! You could use one of the Arduino ethernet shields for a low-power instead, directly looking up the data. :-)

Posted at 10:19 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by matt

When you grow up, you can afford crestron and have the opposite, MY system wakes me 15-30 minutes early if snowfall is detected at night. the touchpanel by the bed is the control and alarm clock, the ceiling speakers are the alarm sounder.

I’ve done this for myself and clients for 5 years now.

Posted at 11:07 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by farthead

“When you grow up, you can afford crestron”
Congrats to farthead for sounding like a complete moron. And missing the point entirely.

However I never found any need to get up earlier or later when it snowed, schools/colleges/unis here never shut for snow and roads are kept clear. But this project has given me a damn good idea, thanks to the creator! Maybe soon I’ll be posting my first hack

Posted at 11:24 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by James

not a bad idea, but i’d rather wake up for 5 minutes to find out. i think the greatest feeling in the world is going back to bed after you’ve found out it’s a snow day. i can’t appreciate it if i’m sleeping through that discovery.

Posted at 11:35 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by toni

are you really that lazy? you’ll never climb the fast food career path with that attitude.

Posted at 12:29 pm on Jul 1st, 2009 by Vonskippy

What about the panic attack that this will cause when you wake up late and haven’t realized it snowed yet?

Posted at 12:30 pm on Jul 1st, 2009 by Jeff

“My dog ate my homework”
“My printer ran out of ink”

and now

“My alarm clock had a software bug”

Posted at 12:33 pm on Jul 1st, 2009 by Robotguy

There are couple of neat alarm clock ideas that I
ve wanted to implement, but the problem is I rarely wake to my alarm clock :-/

Posted at 12:57 pm on Jul 1st, 2009 by cptfalcon

@ cptfalcon
Enjoy this one then: http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/553231/1455d6b7/wakker_worden.html

Posted at 1:17 pm on Jul 1st, 2009 by nebulous

what about Hurricane days in Florida?

Posted at 3:49 pm on Jul 1st, 2009 by redfireant3

great hack

Posted at 8:16 pm on Jul 1st, 2009 by anon

methinks the kid likes his sleep.

mealsothinks he probably has it setup to ‘accidentally’ turn off unintended.. talk about an excuse…..

Posted at 1:41 pm on Jul 3rd, 2009 by incognito53