“The Alarm Clock Ate My Duvet Cover, That’s Why I’m Late!”

Some people just won’t wake up. Alarm clocks don’t cut it, flashing lights won’t work, loud music just becomes the soundtrack of an impenetrable dream. Maybe an alarm clock that rudely yanks the covers off the bed will do the trick.

Or not, but [1up Living] decided to give it a go. His mechanism is brutally simple — a large barrel under the foot of the bed around which the warm, cozy bedclothes can wind. An alarm clock is rigged with a switch on the bell to tell an Arduino to wind the drum and expose your sleeping form to the harsh, cold world. To be honest, the fact that this is powered by a 2000-lb winch that would have little trouble dismembering anyone who got caught up in the works is a bit scary. But we understand that the project is not meant to be a practical solution to oversleeping; if it were, [1up Living] might be better off using the winch to pull the bottom sheet to disgorge the sleeper from the bed entirely.

Something gentler to suit your oversleeping needs might be this Neopixel sunrise clock to coax you out of bed naturally.

23 thoughts on ““The Alarm Clock Ate My Duvet Cover, That’s Why I’m Late!”

  1. Reminds me of Thomas Midgely, the one man atmosphere destroyer. After blessing the world by inventing the lead additive for petrol/gasoline and CFCs for refrigeration, he was suffocated by a contraption he built to get himself out of bed.

    A safety cut-off for that powerful winch drive seems prudent.

  2. I once built an ad-hoc alarm clock with an electromagnet, a pulley, a 5kg weigt and a rope connected to the blankets.

    NOT fun.
    Really, spend some more time in bed, you won’t need an alarm clok and you will feel much better during the day.

  3. I have experimented with several solutions over the years, from annoying sounds, to putting alarm clocks on the the other side of the room or using several alarm clocks at the same time. All of the solutions worked temporarily at best.

    What did the trick is a math alarm clock on my phone, which cannot be turned off without correctly answering a number of sums. After tuning the difficulty level, having to wake up just enough to answer the sums correctly prevents me from going right back to sleep after turning the alarm off. Some apps even have fairly advanced tuning options for the snooze function, making the experience perfectly bearable.

  4. I think that Arduino is neat and all but it seems that people often forget about good old mechanical engineering and simple electronics: I made a device years ago that, while its purpose was to automatically swat the neighborhood cats as they attempted to enter the dog run and intimidate my old dog and eat his food, did the same work that this does. I used a drill motor (which operated a paddle) , wired to an adequate power supply which, inline, had a photoresistor, connected to a led that was hooked up to the speaker wire on a PIR motion sensor from radio shack. substitute the PIR unit for an alarm clock.

    but this is cool too.

    1. fire is definitely a reason to get out of bed. might as well hook it up to a TENS unit. if done right you don’t actually have to wake up in order to get out of bed. you could program the ai to “remote-control” you all the way to work. DARPA: I’m easy to find so hit me up and we’ll weapon-ize stuff!

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