Joystick controlled alarm clock

posted Dec 1st 2009 10:00am by
filed under: home hacks

While it may sound like a dirty joke, turning off the alarm clock with a wiggle of your joystick is entirely possible here. [Sean] was inspired by the light gun alarm clock featured in Make magazine a while back and decided to build something similar. Instead of going the light gun route, he chose to use a joystick. You set the time on the clock using the joystick and the fire button works as a snooze button. Though it currently doesn’t have a snooze-waggle feature, it could without too much effort.

[Sean]‘s server is small. He notes in his comments that he can’t handle the traffic from us. This is why we had to find it our selves instead of him submitting it. Tsk Tsk. To help, we have included the few other pictures of his build after the break. If you really want to overload his poor little server, you’ll find the link to his site here, instead of at the beginning of the article.

 

[via flickr]



13 Responses to Joystick controlled alarm clock

  • shoosh says:

    most… useless… hack… ever.

  • Brett says:

    Ok shoosh, I’ll bite.

    Submit your own awesome hack.

  • tom says:

    Sweet – it’s what should be on every geeks bedside table. I wish I had one.

  • Vonskippy says:

    Take a working UI and fubar it with something completely stupid. Yeah, that’s a great “hack”.

  • peter says:

    oh come on guys, its entertaining. if you must have some productive purpose behind a hack, you can just pretend this is a proof of concept or something. the guy thought it would be entertaining to add a joystick to an alarm clock and he did it nicely, so chill out.

  • MS3FGX says:

    When I read the heading I figured it would be an alarm that could only be turned off by performing certain movements on the stick, which actually makes a lot of sense as remembering and inputting the movements would be a good exercise to pull you out of half-sleep.

    While I imagine this system could be modified to do something along those lines…the current implementation is a little odd to say the least.

  • aztraph says:

    if you start playing battlezone in your sleep, you might never wake up or set off the alarm after 2 minutes, who knows. it would be better with the arduino that makes the hackaday.com/2009/10/11/nes-controller-storage-with-security/ work. you have to cognitive enough to enter the right code

  • Nemo says:

    Hacking is art. It stimulates the mind, nothing wrong with that. Cool concept and nice aesthetic to control an alarm clock with a joystick (especially a retro one).

  • Concino says:

    I like this implemented on a wrist watch :)

  • MixaDJ says:

    Good Idea. Well implemented, but other than controlling the clocks time setting functions, it should be used to turn the alarm off. That way it helps wake you up by making you use your motor skills. I think something like this with an NES controller and a pic or duino to interpret button combinations to turn off the alarm would be kool. Konami code wake up anyone?

  • Alan Parekh says:

    Nice use of the retro gear! The only thing that could have made it better is if the clock was an old flip clock. :)

  • medix says:

    The interface looks pretty good. I’m glad to see that the joystick isn’t used to disable the alarm at 6 am. ;)

  • Nikhil says:

    Clocks not only make sure you are never late, but they also make every wall look great. Branded Clocks with your corporate logo or details are extremely effective at getting your message into the right heads.

    http://www.promotionproducts.com.au/galleries/Desk-and-Office/Promotional-Clocks

  • Leave a Reply

    XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title="" rel=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

    Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks each day, every day from around the web as well as hacking related news.

    Send us your hacks






         




    Hacks

    Resources