Arduino Alarm Clock: Final Prototype

Designed an alarm clock using light control to wake people. Prototyped with Arduino.

DESIGN

My design goal for this project is to make an alarm clock that will use effective methods to wake people up. My initial design was a running alarm clock that could also control room light. After learning more about Arduino and asked several people’s feedback on this idea, I decided to only make an alarm clock that will control the room light without running, because I got several feedback saying that controlling room light might be more effective than just a running alarm clock. More specifically, this is an Arduino based alarm clock. Users setup time through Arduino program, which includes the duration of snooze and total time of snooze. With this information, the alarm clock beeps when it is the time for users to wake up. When users turn off the alarm clock, the clock will turn on the light as a method to make sure users wake up. Also, when it reaches the maximum time of snooze, the alarm will turn on the light while keep beeping if users haven’t turned the alarm off.

PROCESS

I started prototyping by trying to get each individual part work. I first worked with the real time clock and LCD display in order to understand the format of time in Arduino, and how to write information to LCD screen.

Then, I continued by adding the power tail switch to the existing time display program.

After that, I added buzzer and button to the board. Because the room environment is relatively quiet, it might be okay to use buzzer for the prototype for making the alarm beep sound. The button is used to turn off the alarm clock.

I started combining all the parts and putting them together after figuring out how to get each piece to work. I thought about 3D printing the out box for the alarm clock, but I didn’t have enough time to modeling and printing. Surprisingly, the adafruit box was a perfect fit for all the electronics, so I just used that box as the alarm clock case.

Since LCD display was a little bit small to read (especially when people are not fully awake and without glasses), I used a seven-segment backpack display to display the time. I ran a quick test with my lamp and adjust a few details in the code to make the alarm clock work properly. I am still not sure whether turning on the light would be a really effective method to wake up people, but this method seems to work for most of my testers.

EVALUATE

I evaluated this prototype with myself in real context and also evaluated with my roommates. Most functions worked well during the test. The position of the button was a little bit hard to reach for people with various hand/ finger sizes. In order to turn off the alarm clock, users have to hold the button down for a while, and if users don’t know this, they might not be able to turn off the alarm effectively. When I tested it with myself, the alarm kept beeping even after it turned the light on. And this annoyed me a little bit when I couldn’t turn off the alarm so I just unplugged the whole clock. After the test, I adjusted the code to make the alarm clock less annoying but still effective, by adjusting the beeping frequency, and time. In general, I would say this is a simple but successful prototype.

REFLECTION

From this project experience, I actually found Arduino as a fast and simple tool for prototyping. I had no idea about how to prototype the alarm clock, but as I followed the instructions and tutorials online, I could prototype one successfully. The libraries in Arduino are helpful as well, and they simplify the whole coding process. However, the design is limited by the prototyping technique, time and available materials during the process. For my initial running alarm clock idea, I have to have two Arduino board communicate with each other with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth piece in order to get an alarm clock running freely and control the light wirelessly. By the time I figured it out, I thought I do not have enough time to do this and it also might be too expensive for just one alarm clock, so I cut the idea and just kept the controlling room light part. But this also allows me to think from the practical aspect about my design, when I actually tried to get it to work. And this forced me to think what is the key aspect in my design that would actually meet my design goal.

DEMO