Alarm Clock Uses Raspberry Pi To Poll Google Calendar

rpi-google-calendar-alarm-clock

We know a lot of people love using their smart phone as a bedside alarm clock. The problem is that a mobile phone is mobile by nature and eventually you’ll forget to put it in the bedroom one night. That’s why we like the solution that [Devon Bray] has chosen. He set up his Raspberry Pi as an alarm clock that is set using Google Calendar.

The setup which he shows off in his video is quite simple. The Raspberry Pi is connected to a set of powered computer speakers. It plays a song whenever an appointment called “wake” comes up on his Google Calendar. This is accomplished by using the Google Data APIs Python Client Library (isn’t that a mouthful?).

This only scratches the surface of what is possible. With this in place you could easily add LEDs to the room for a sunrise alarm. But if you’d prefer a more bare-bones hardware side of things that’s possible too.

19 thoughts on “Alarm Clock Uses Raspberry Pi To Poll Google Calendar

    1. # Johnson, you’re 3 hours late for work!!
      # Sorry boss, leap second.
      # What?!?
      # Well, at 3AM my alarm clock decided to sync with NTP and got a leap second. Although my alarm clock logic runs in Python, there’s a Java OSGI bundle that also checks the water level in my water cooker to prep the coffee. Turns out there was a bug in the leap second handler that sent Java in a 99% CPU consumption and things got messy.
      # … Oooh …kay … don’t let it happen again. Better buy a standard alarm clock
      # Don’t really have a choice, sir.
      # How so?
      # The house burnt down.
      # Wot?
      # The Arduino on my water cooker only has 2k RAM. It piled up with messages for my alarm clock and somehow the pin that drives its LiPo charger went high.

  1. I used to use my phone as my alarm clock but it would sometimes die instead of waking me up in the morning. Missed classes on several occasions because of it.

    1. What I did to prevent a dead phone is make a tasker script that monitors the battery in night mode. If the battery gets low it sets off the alarm early. It sucks being woken up early, but it beats being late to work.

  2. I never forget to take my Phone in the bedroom, however i do sometimes forget to take it with me when i leave. I Don’t think this will solve my problem.

    What i like is taking action on google tasks, this could be used on other home automation tasks.

  3. I’m on call 24×7 for my job, we have monitoring systems in place an if something goes bad, I get a call….to alleviate that call waking up my wife I used a pi to check my email for the automated messages and if they exist to trigger a deaf alarm (think giant phone vibrator) under my bed.

    I’ve had mixed issues with this, my first pi was a dud and locked up within minutes, the second I’m on is better but it still crashes, I’ve reduced this issue with a automatic restart daily (heat is not the issue).

    I don’t think I would be comfortable to rely on this as a sole mechanism to get my butt up. But I have thought about doing exactly this before, hope it works out!

  4. I really like this for so much more than just an alarm clock. As a previous poster pointed out, this could be applied to things like home automation, etc. – the list goes on!

    My only caveat with this is the lack of a “snooze” mechanism (the pillow won’t let go of my head that abruptly). This could be easily solved by using one of the I/O pins however; if I actually get around to building this, I’ll share.

  5. Nice idea that I’m definitely gonna have to bookmark. I have one of those week alarm clocks, but that doesn’t work so well when you get switched to shift work that changes every week. Already store my schedule in google calendar, but there’s no way in HELL the standard ‘notification’ you can set will be enough to wake me up. I’ll probably end up just porting this code to run on my desktop though — I’ve been setting up a home automation system using some Raspberry Pis (may be switching to a BeagleBone for the main control though,) but the only node in my bedroom is likely to be my desktop PC…

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