Ultimate Alarm Clock

Note: Although in theory this device works perfectly, don’t plug it in an electricity outlet that’s within reach from your bed (which is what I did, so now I often just pull the plug and sleep on)

I have often trouble getting up on time in the weekends and during holidays. Even when I put my alarm clock in a place where I have to get out of bed to switch it off, I usually return to bed “for a few moments”, which usually means that I’m not getting out of bed before it’s about 12:00. This behaviour causes inproductivity at daytime and sleeplessness at night.

So when I was laying awake again I started thinking about building the ultimate alarm clock. After some tinkering I decided that it should have these features:

• It should use an actual alarm bell because that’s cool.
• It should display its time in binary format because that’s cool and allows me to recycle several parts of my binary clock, which was still incompleted and was only collecting dust.
• It should be impossible for me to turn the alarm clock off (using any non-destructive ways) before it’s absolutely sure that I won’t go back to bed again.
• It should have the possibility to go into a “dark mode” in which all the lights are switched off so it doesn’t annoy me when I’m trying to fall asleep.

As said before, I wanted to use parts of my still incompleted binary clock for this project. This is how the clock in question was looking:

I re-used the LED board, removed most of the components on the other board (leaving only the three BCD counters in place) and re-used that as well.

I was too lazy to take any pictures during the building process, but the finished product looks like this:

The case measures about 15×13x8 centimeters. The bells which I happened to have lying around are from a very old telephone and were the remains of my very first electronics project (which was about seven years ago).

The most remarkable feature of this alarm clock is the fact that it uses a microswitch mounted in my door to detect if I left my room. It can only be disabled when the door is open.

The hideous backsides of the circuit boards:

The design and construction of the circuit are a bit awkward because I didn’t design anything beforehand so during the build I had to make several changes because some things didn’t work out as expected.

As always, the source code for the software is available. However, I strongly doubt that it will be useful to anybody else other than myself because it was specifically written for my circuit of which I have no design whatsoever.