Retractable Alarm Clock

20

The Retractable Alarm Clock is one of the Cornell University Microcontroller Design Final Projects. Colleen Carey and Vincent Zou have made a product that has a concept that could be marketable. I am not much of a morning person and the snooze button is always handy, this could work for people like me. 🙂

“The Retractable Alarm Clock is the next generation alarm clock that combines both active alarm feature and penalty system that trains the users to wake up to the alarm over time. The clock in this projects consists of a head unit that is to be hanged on the ceiling above the bed and has a retractable snooze button which hangs to reachable height above the bed. When the user snooze the alarm, the snooze button moves up, promoting the user to physically get up and to snooze the next time.

By using an ATMega32 chip, the alarm clock can generate different alarm sounds. The time is displayed on LED lights. A customized snooze button is made to accommodate the movement of the retractable cord powered by a small dc motor. The alarm gradually increases the loudness to wake up sleepers gently. To prevent the sleeper from falling asleep to the monotonic sound of alarms, our alarm varies the frequency every 12 chirps.”

You May Also Like

Spontaneous Pop-up Display – Collapsible Display

NTP Synced Nixie Tube Clock

NortHACKton Etch a Sketch Computer

20 Comments


  1. Wow – cool project! Unfortunately, I can tell you now, the designer has failed to take in to consideration my ability to sleep through extremely loud and blaring alarms – hence the reason I now use an alarm with a “bed shaker” that sits just underneath my pillow.


  2. Quite cool – perhaps the final stage would be that it starts dropping things on your head! Question for Vincent: How did you concentrate on this project ?



  4. there are so many of these alarm clocks that “run away” or something of that nature…

    I still want my alarm clock that makes a bacon smell instead of a noise… that wake everyone up.


  5. I wouldnt hang that from any bridges like those guys from cartoon network does, that really does look like a b-o-m-b…..


  6. Oh, this is cool.

    Have you heard about the procrastinator’s clock? It varies in time 15 minutes so the person never knows if it’s 15 minutes ahead or right on time! It is guaranteed not to be behind, so it’s perfect for those people who are always 15 minutes late!


  7. Think Geek sells one that runs around the floor (what geek as a clean enough floor?)
    Personally I just put my alarmclock across the room


  8. When I was first out of college entering the workforce, and wasn’t used to getting up early every day, I had to do the same thing. Except I had one that went off next to me, that I of course shut off without even remembering, then I had another placed way across the room that forced me to get out of bed.

    Believe it or not, sometimes I still went back to bed after all that! Now things are better. Like the rest of the working stiffs, I’ve been brainwashed & trained to get up like a zombie whether my alarm goes off or not! 😉


  9. Wow. Now THERE’s a prototype I’d never want to take through Customs. Oh look! An IED!


  10. I would agree, it would not be a good idea taking this through customs. I think this would help you get the rubber glove cavity search! 🙂 I think a shocking bed connected to the alarm clock would work quite good. You would have 1 minute after the alarm goes off before the bed energizes.


  11. Kevin: Why not integrate a George Forman grill in with your alarm clock for that? You could wake up to freshly cooked bacon every morning, and the grill shuts itself off. Well, there is the problem of keeping the bacon fresh over the night.


  12. NGinuity:

    You also have to be careful that you don’t step on the George Foreman grill when getting out of bed. If you did that you could be on crutches. Worse yet, you could become handicap, and we all know that people aren’t as sensitive to that as they should be! 😉


  13. Matthew…

    Funny you should mention that….I had a coworker tell me that exact same story yesterday! It’s actually what inspired me to make the recommendation.


  14. Have some peltier coolers keep the meat fresh until morning then turn off the coolers and turn on the heat when it s ready to wake the person up. I am sure some product developer is searching for bacon smell in aerosol form right now for making this happen…


  15. I would need to figure out how to keep the dogs from getting to it before I do too!


  17. I think “The Office” is going to cause people to burn their houses down, haha!


  18. This advanced future alarm clock id really of great importance. They way it provides features snoozing the alarm and get the person trained on how to wake up over time with the alarm is outstanding. Its is far much better than those of digital video alarm I would surely like to have one, once it comes in the market.



  20. Can u show me about the whole hardware parts circuit diagram?? so that i can try to do it by myself.. thanks!!

Comments are closed.