Once upon a time, you had the option of waking up to a bell, a harsh buzzer, or whatever happened to be on the radio that morning. Now that it’s the 21st century, we’ve gotten used to being able to set our alarms to whatever sound or song we want, but what if you don’t just want to wake up to sound? Enter [Impossible_Agent1436] a.k.a. [brunokeymolen]’s Video Alarm Clock that will wake you up to whatever clip you want, as long as it fits on the 720 pixel square display.

That display is a pre-built Waveshare module powered by an ESP32-P4, which looks like a handy bit of kit aside from being out of stock at the moment. The dev board makes this almost entirely a software project– the only hardware [bruno] had to come up with was the 3D-printed stand to hold it on his bedside. That’s not a slight to [bruno]; it was a good choice in the spirit of “work smarter, not harder”. Sometimes you want to reinvent the wheel, and sometimes you just want an alarm clock.

The module’s RTC means it keeps good time, and the built-in SD card reader means you can load up a whole library of clips to wake up to. The only caveat is that those files have to be AVI containers holding 720×720 MJPEG video with PCM stereo audio at 44.1 kHz, and you’re limited to old FAT filename rules: eight characters, and none of them special.

This is an easier project and a better idea than the exploding capacitor alarm clock, but there’s no arguing which would get us out of bed faster. If you miss the old days of clock radios, you can always bring them back with the right microcontroller.

Story via reddit.