May 19 2007
The Ideal Alarm Clock?
Evelyn has recently been working on her LED PIC-based clocks. See the below video for her kooky Sea Horse Clock:
One of her projects is to come up with the “ideal” alarm clock. So, I put this out to my readers: What features would you like to see in your ideal alarm clock? How would it wake you up? What do you hate about your existing alarm clock? Are you one of those people who can sleep through a blaring alarm? If so, what do you do? Any and all ideas are welcome.
8 Responses to “The Ideal Alarm Clock?”
One in which Barry can’t set off while sleepwalking and thus oversleep for the whole morning…
In a weird way, I’m serious. Some people I know always sleep through, or turn off in half sleep their alarms. Maybe for those, you have to create something that is more complicated to turn off.
I like Dave’s idea of Mon-Fri only, because I usually forget to turn it off Friday night and will have to go off on a Saturday morning.
Light seems to be an effective tool in waking me up–I find that when it’s cloudy out, I can sleep later.
Then again, I have a natural alarm clock called my brain that gets me up at 5 AM every morning and am also a very light sleeper…
The alarm clock I have is nice. It does a night *ding*, tells me the time and the temperature, then starts playing music.
Nice, not “night” ding.
Don’t worry, I don’t know how to ready the Seahorse either.
The hours are one color, then tens of minutes, then minutes, I think. I have to check.
Yea, the more expensive ones have dual alarms and by-day settings. I don’t quite get the dual alarm thing, since one person is always going to be closer to the clock than the other. (Unless you have beds like I Love Lucy.)
We use one of the “light” wakeup clocks and it works well. It starts with light at 6:15, then birds chirping at 6:30, and then an alarm at 6:45. The birds are usually enough to wake me up–I almost never get the alarm.
One of the features I want to have is a very very dim night setting. I call it the “insomniac” feature, since I hate not being able to sleep and then seeing the time. It makes it even harder to sleep. I’d rather have no display at all during my designated sleeping period.
I also like the idea of the MP3 for the music (versus CD). The number of robotic sounds on my “light” clock are too few, and get annoying. I’d rather be able to customize the sound.
And thinking about weekends more: It would be nice to have different wakeup times for different days. For example, I want to sleep in a little on Saturday, but not too much. It would be cool if I could do 6:30 M-F, then 8:00 for S-S. For now, I just have the birds chirp every day.
There are a couple of projects out there that do more complicated “snooze” setups. For example, have a cord from the ceiling that you pull. Each snooze pull and the cord gets shorter (thereby making you sit up more). The idea is interesting, but I think the novelity (and need to mount on the ceiling) might wear off.
P.P.S. In the video Evelyn is changing the clock settings, that’s why the LEDs are moving so quickly. Normally they would cycle on the minute.
The reds are the hours, the greens are 10 minute, the yellows one minute. Cycle through 10 minutes and the green goes up one. Cycle through the 6 10-minutes and the red flops over.
An alternate would be this:
http://www.hammacher.com/publish/73755.asp
The Flying Alarm Clock.
This digital alarm clock launches a rotor into the air that flies around the room as the alarm sounds, flying up to 9′ in the air, and will not cease ringing until the rotor is returned to the alarm clock base, compelling even the most stubborn sleepers to get out of bed on time.
i REALLY LIKE Ev’s clock. Of course you know we have a Moon-Clock (LL Bean); I like it very much. Years ago I had a music alarm clock, that I put on my dresser across the room. It was set for 6am to a station that played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ just at that time. If that didn’t get me up and out PDQ!
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/ledcoffee