Alarm And Wake Up Light

On the shortest day of the year wouldn’t it be nice to wake up to a bright room? This alarm clock with an integrated wake-up light is one way to do just that. It has some nice features, like a wood veneer that allows the seven-segment display to shine through, but hides it when the display is turned off. There’s also a feature to adjust the color based on ambient room temperature (another way to dwell on how cold it is in your bedroom).

A CC1101 RF chip came to the party, but we can’t figure out what it’s purpose is in this circuit. If you can shed some light on its involvement please do so in the comments.

[Thanks Eric]

18 thoughts on “Alarm And Wake Up Light

  1. the project page mentioned the alarm is set via a chrono’s watch. i would imagine the watch will send a rf data packet (315/886/915Mhz) to the alarm clock to set it up.
    i.e. there is no button on the alarm itself, setup is done via watch. expensive way to avoid a few buttons.

  2. [quote]We want to merge the idea of having a wake-up light with the Chronos being an all around tool to control things wireless. The idea is simple – when you set an alarm on your Chronos watch, the lamp will synchronize with the alarm of the Chronos.[quote]

    So the chip is used to set the time as well as sync with any alarms you may have set on the watch. Pretty neat idea.

  3. “There’s also a feature to adjust the color based on ambient room temperature (another way to dwell on how cold it is in your bedroom).”

    This would be good if it was the inverse of room temperature. Ie cool looking in the summer and warm looking in the winter.

  4. I’m fond of clocks. You can never have enough clocks and you can tweak the design in any number of ways.

    One of the ideas I’ve fiddled with is the idea of having a whole-home time server using a high-end temperature-controlled RTC which periodically does an NTP or radio time sync. Adding that to individual clocks gets prohibitive after a while, while receive-only wireless can be pretty simple especially if you design a standard daughter board for it. It’s a bit over the top and it introduces a monolithic point of failure, but it sounds fun.

  5. “wouldn’t it be nice to wake up to a bright room?”
    No it wouldn’t, I wish there would be dark and cold in the whole year. Guess you cant get that on many places but around the north pole anymore. Goddamn global warming killed xmas everywhere, one day theres snowing other day its 20C outside

  6. Neet Little hack.

    my buddy uses X10 for his wakeup and alarming. He uses it to dim the lights at bed time as well. Using his unix box and some perl-scripting he never sleeps in

  7. Holy $hit! You are not going to believe this … but, this was the exact same project I proposed to my “electronics” hacker friend.

    I have no clue what a resistor/capacitor/diode/etc are. So, I suggested to my ec-hacker friend that he should help me build a small alarm clock that will:
    -> Play a nice tune when the alarm goes off: I should be able to download tunes (say mozart/bach/etc) to the alarm clock
    -> Have a set of LEDs that will light up when the alarm goes off, only if there is no sun light at the time the alarm goes off. This will be useful to my old parents who like to get up early in the morning. I want the led to light up their way to the bathrooms and the kitchen.

    I was thinking this could be done with some circuitry coupled to an arduino, but, I didn’t know what circuitry I needed. And my friend has been too busy to build this for me.

    Now you have done this and you deserve a prize. Can you add a few more features (listed above) to your project?

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