Because my bedroom has no windows, I have some troubles waking up. The moment I had a neopixel ring in my hands, I knew they where the perfect basis for an alarm clock. Tochether with an alarm clock shield from seeed studio I had the basis for my own sunrize alarm clock
Components
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Arduino
Main brains
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Tick tock shield
A learning shield from seeed studio that functions as a thermometer, buzzer and a real time clock. This together makes a alarm clock, together with the needed libraries.
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16 pixel neopixel ring
A great and bright ring of RBG led lights from Adafruit
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Difusor
The neopixels are blinding on full strength, so a diffusing vessel needs to be found. The first prototype was a empty day cream container. The current is a plastic led light bulb cap.
The start was ordering the components. I already had the arduino and the neopixel ring, and ordered the tick tock shield. The nice thing about a shield is that things just works.
Until they don't. The buzzer that belongs to the shield didn't fit the holes on the PCB. The excellent webshop send me a new buzzer. But my laptop and soldering iron broke down shortly after each other (independently) so the project went on hold. In the mean time I moved into the apartment without windows, and found out that there was a local hackerspace, Bitlair. There I started working on this project again. I soldered all components. When firing up the arduino with the example code the 7-segment display showed... Gibberish. Apparently there is a batch of shield that was delivered with a wrong buzzer and wrong display. Because I ordered it some time ago, i solved it myself with some help from the guys at bitlair. I ordered a new display and it was up and running.
Now I had a working alarm clock and a working light ring. The only thing that needed to happen was connecting the two. Sounds simple enough, right?