Snow days are great, but generally you still have to wake up to find out if it is a snow day. [insingertech] decided to make a system to solve this problem. He made an alarm clock that would automatically de activate if school is cancelled. What a pleasant surprise it would be to just wake up and find that you had been allowed to sleep in. It is using an Arduino and a python script to control the state of the alarm based off of an online school closing announcement. You can download the software from the instructable.
Great idea! I’ll certainly build one of these if I ever get to live in a place with snow again.
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
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.
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
Nice project, practical and well done. I wish I had thought of this during high school. My college courses almost never get canceled <_<
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?
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)
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. :-)
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.
“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
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.
are you really that lazy? you’ll never climb the fast food career path with that attitude.
What about the panic attack that this will cause when you wake up late and haven’t realized it snowed yet?
“My dog ate my homework”
“My printer ran out of ink”
and now
“My alarm clock had a software bug”
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 :-/
@ cptfalcon
Enjoy this one then: http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/553231/1455d6b7/wakker_worden.html
what about Hurricane days in Florida?
great hack
methinks the kid likes his sleep.
mealsothinks he probably has it setup to ‘accidentally’ turn off unintended.. talk about an excuse…..
I also suffer from panic attacks and i can manage it by deep and slow breathing. i also practice meditation.. |