Wake Up To Fresh Coffee!

May 21, 2017 by Jenny List 18 Comments

Be careful what you say when you are shown a commercial product that you think you could make yourself, you might find yourself having to make good on your promise.

When he was shown a crowdfunded alarm clock coffee maker, [Fabien-Chouteau] said “just give me an espresso machine and I can do the same”. A Nespresso capsule coffee machine duly appeared on his bench, so it was time to make good on the promise.

The operation of a Nespresso machine is simple enough, there is a big lever on the front that opens the capsule slot and allows a spent capsule to drop into a hopper. Drop in a new capsule, pull the lever down to load it into the mechanism, then press one of the buttons to tell it to prime itself. After a minute you can them press either of the large cup or the small cup buttons, and your coffee will be delivered.

To automate this with an alarm clock there is no necessity to operate the lever, it’s safe to leave loading a capsule to the user. Therefore all the clock has to do is trigger the process by operating the buttons. A quick investigation with a multimeter on the button PCB found that the voltage present was 15 V, well above the logic level of the STM32F469 board slated for the clock. Thus a simple circuit was devised using a MOSFET to do the switching.

Finally, the clock software was created for the STM32F469. The chip’s 2D graphics acceleration hardware and the development board’s high quality display make for a very slick interface indeed.

You can see the resulting clock in the video below the break. It’s an alarm clock coffeemaker we’d be proud to have beside our beds, but there’s one slight worry. On a mains-powered device like the Nespresso the low voltage rails are not always mains-isolated, and it’s not clear whether or not this is the case. Maybe we’d have incorporated an opto-isolator, just in case.

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Wake Up With A NeoPixel Sunrise Alarm Clock

August 11, 2016 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

Like many of us, [Lee] wakes up every morning grumpy and tired. Once he decided to try to do something about it, he settled on making a sunrise alarm clock using NeoPixels. Over the course of thirty minutes the clock illuminates 60 NeoPixels one by one in blue mode to simulate a sunrise.

The clock has three modes: 30-minute sunrise, analog time display, and a seconds counter that uses the full RGB range of the LEDs to light up one for each passing second. It runs on an Arduino Pro Mini knockoff and an RTC module for the sake of simplicity. [Lee] chained NeoPixel strips together in five rows of eight, which allowed him to use a 3×5 font to display the time. The only other electronics are passives to protect the LEDs.

NeoPixels are great, but powering them becomes an issue pretty quickly. [Lee] did the math and figured that he would need 3.4 A to drive everything. He found a 3-outlet USB power adapter that delivers 3.4 A total while shopping at IKEA for an enclosure. [Lee] took his first Instructable from beginner to intermediate level by cracking the adapter open and using two of the USB ports wired in parallel to provide 5 V at 3.4 A. [Lee] has the code available along with detailed instructions for replicating this build. Be sure to check out the demo after the break.

We love a good clock build around here, especially when they involve Blinkenlights. For those less interested in building an alarm clock, here’s a word clock that pulls time and weather data with an ESP8266.

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Motorized Music Box Cranks Out Stairway To Heaven

May 31, 2016 by Kristina Panos 20 Comments

[Bokononestly] found a lil’ music box that plays Stairway to Heaven and decided those were just the kinds of dulcet tones he’d like to wake up to every morning. To each his own; I once woke up to Blind Melon’s “No Rain” every day for about six months. [Bokononestly] is still in the middle of this alarm clock project right now. One day soon, it will use a *duino to keep track of the music box’s revolutions and limit the alarm sound to one cycle of the melody.

[Bokononestly] decided to drive the crank of the music box with a geared DC motor from an electric screwdriver. After making some nice engineering drawings of the dimensions of both and mocking them up in CAD, he designed and printed a base plate to mount them on. A pair of custom pulleys mounted to the motor shaft and the crank arm transfer motion using the exact right rubber band for the job. You can’t discount the need for a big bag ‘o rubber bands.
In order to count the revolutions, he put a wire in the path of the metal music box crank and used the body of the box as a switch. Check out the build video after the break and watch him prove it with the continuity function of a multimeter. A clever function that should at some point be substituted out for a leaf switch.

We’ve covered a lot of cool clock builds over the years, including one or two that run Linux. And say what you will about Stairway; it’s better than waking up to repeated slaps in the face.

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Simone Does Strange Things With Motors And Servos

December 29, 2015 by Adam Fabio 52 Comments

If DC motors are the “Hello World” of making things move, servo motors are the next logical step. [Simone Giertz] is following this exact path with the Wake-up Machine and her newly released Chopping Machine. [Simone] discovered that the best way to wake up in the morning is to be repeatedly slapped in the face by a robot. The Wake-up Machine was custom designed to do exactly that. Who could sleep through being repeatedly slapped in the face? A beefy gearmotor from ServoCity spins a Halloween prop arm round and round, providing “refreshing” slaps.

The system is triggered by an alarm clock. The clock’s alarm output is connected to an Arduino Uno. The Uno then activates a relay, which spins up the motor. [Simone] realizes that she could have skipped the Arduino here, but it was the path of least resistance in for this project. If the slapping hand isn’t enough to get you going, the Wake-up machine does have a secret weapon: It may just grab your hair, turning a video shoot into a painful ordeal.

Simone’s latest project is the Chopping Machine. ServoCity must have liked her first videos, as they’ve sponsored her for this project. The machine consists of two knives that … well, chop. Two high-powered servos are controlled by an Arduino Nano. The servos raise spring-loaded knives, which then drop down, chopping vegetables, fingers, and anything else in their path. The whole machine is built with aluminum channel stock, and a huge wooden cutting board. Of course, just building the machine wasn’t enough. [Simone] filmed a parody infomercial for any perspective Chopping Machine buyers, and to put fear in the heart of anyone named Chad.

Click past the break for a couple of [Simone’s] vlogs describing the machines.

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Hacklet 84 – Alarm Clocks

November 13, 2015 by Adam Fabio 12 Comments

The stereotypical hardware hacker is a creature of the night. Some of us do our best work in the wee hours. The unfortunate side effect of this is that we have a hard time getting up in the morning. Sometimes life demands a hacker be up-and-at-em before noon though. In these cases, the only solution is an alarm clock. This week’s Hacklet features some of the best alarm clock projects on Hackaday.io!

We start with [hberg32] and Merciless Pi Alarm Clock. Merciless is a good name for this Raspberry Pi based clock. We have to say it’s quite snazzy with its laser cut case and large seven segment LED face. When the alarm goes off though, this Pi bites back.

Titanium drivers powered by a 20 watt amplifier will wake even the heaviest sleepers. If that’s not enough, [hberg32] added a bed shaker to vibrate you out of the sack. The snooze button only works 3 times, after that you can press all you want, the music will still play. As if that wasn’t enough, this clock even has a pressure sensor. If you get back in bed, the alarm starts up again. Truly fitting of the name “merciless”.

[Ceady] took the kinder, gentler route with Integrated Room Sunrise Simulator. This alarm clock simulates dawn, gently waking the user up. A Lutron Maestro series wireless dimmer allows the sunrise simulator to slowly increase the room’s light level over a period of 10 minutes, allowing [Ceady] to wake up silently.

The clock itself uses an ATmega168 for control. [Ceady] spent a considerable amount of time testing out different methods of creating a seven segment LED display. When casting with cornstarch and resin didn’t do the trick, he went to commercial LED diffuser film from Inventables. The film proved to be just what he was looking for.

Next up is [Spiros Papadimitriou] with DIY Chumby-lite. Taking inspiration from [Bunnie Huang] and the Chumby project, [Spiros] created a friendly alarm clock with a touchscreen LCD. Much like the Chumby, this clock packs a WiFi module.

In this case though, the WiFi module is an ESP8266, whose on-board Xtensa microcontroller runs the whole show. [Spiros] programmed his Sparkfun ESP8266 Thing in C++. To keep costs down, [Spiros] left out anything unnecessary – like a real-time clock module. The Chumby-lite uses NTP to stay regular. The reductions paid off – this clock can be built for around $13.00, not including the very nice 3D printed case.

[Wanderingmetalhead] takes us all way back to 1983 with his 7 Day Alarm Clock. 32 years ago, this was [wanderingmetalhead’s] first embedded system project. As the name implies, this clock stores a different wake time for each day of the week. Actual numeric entry sure beats the old “hold two buttons and watch the numbers spin” system.

This is an oldie. The system is based upon a Motorola (which became Freescale, and is now NXP) 6802 micro. The code was written in assembly and cross-assembled on an Apple II. A 3.58MHz colorburst crystal divided down to 60 Hz provides the time base. This setup wasn’t perfect, but good down to a about a minute a month. The whole project lived and worked in an old amplifier case, where it dutifully woke [wanderingmetalhead] each day for 17 years.

If you want to see more alarm clock projects, check out our new alarm clocks list! If I didn’t wake up early enough to catch your project, don’t be shy, just drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

Transparent Alarm Clock Runs Linux

May 30, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 24 Comments

[Benoit] was using an extremely old alarm clock which normally ran on mains power, and he plugged it in to his computer’s UPS to keep it operational during power outages. He noticed that when the UPS switched on that the clock would run fast, though, and apparently it was keeping time by watching the power system frequency. To solve this problem he created his own feature-dense clock which runs Linux.

This alarm clock has everything: seven-segment displays housed in clear epoxy, a touch interface, battery backup, the ability to retrieve the time from an NTP server, and a web interface to change the clock’s settings over the network. That was a large part of [Benoit]’s decision to have the clock run Linux; the network capabilities add a lot of functionality to the clock like the ability to send commands to other devices at particular times. The clock runs on an Aria G25 SOM and has a custom case that looks very professional.

We’re suckers for a high-quality clock builds here, and [Benoit]’s most recent project hits all of our buttons. Even though it doesn’t currently drive people insane or tell confusing time, the Linux and networking capabilities could certainly open up options!

Exposed Clock Is Flippin’ Cool

September 25, 2014 by Marsh 24 Comments

Some hacks are triumphs of cleverness, others…are just cool. [Super Cameraman’s] exposed retro flip clock tends toward the latter half of that spectrum—it may not be the most complex, but we’re relieved that for once there isn’t an Arduino crammed into the back of it.

You can buy pared down, exposed flip clocks at museums for an arm and a leg, or you can trudge through eBay and local thrift shops until you come across a cheapo clock radio. [Super Cameraman’s] clock cost him exactly $2, and is split into two sections: a clock side and a radio side. Prying off the knobs and popping open the case reveals all the shiny mechanisms and electronics, most of which he trashed. The radio and even the transformer were removed, leaving only the flip clock, which he re-wired directly to the plug—it seems these types of clocks run straight off 120VAC. Check out the video below.

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