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?