“The idea ofthis project is to create an alarm that wakes via ambient light. In itself, this isn’t terribly hard. All you need is some LEDs, a clock and a microcontroller of some kind. Wire it all up, write some code and you’re done. I believe there are already numerous tutorials on how to do something like this. It’s been done many times before and honestly, isn’t very interesting. Thankfully, I decided to make this alarm as a birthday present for my girlfriend who despises anything tec. Apparently, wires are ugly and analog is the way to go. So here is the aim: take some LEDs, a clock and a microcontroller of some kind, wire it all up, write some code for it, and then hide it in a wooden shell to make it look nice and analog. Inspiration for this project is the “DIY Heng Lamp” by JustAddSharks. I love the idea of using floating corks in the middle of a round lamp as a switch to turn the light on and off. This is a perfect concept on how to activate the alarm and how to turn it off again once I’m awake. With the activation switch taken care off, the next step is to find some nice way to set the time at which I want to be woken. Moving away from the Heng Lamp, I decided to make the alarm circular and use two disks to set the hour and minute. This means that the ‘device’ will not actually be able to tell the current time. Considering that I’m building an alarm and not a clock, I think that’s okay. So here is how the alarm works. Set the time at which you want to be woken using the hour and minute disk (similar to a real clock, the set hour and minute are at the top, at the twelve o’ clock location). Connect the two corks in the middle and to activate the alarm. The LED’s in the back will slowly start turning on 15 minutes before the set time. Once the time at which you want to be woken has been reached, the LED’s will have reached maximum brightness and a small piezo speaker will start making some noise. Disconnect the corks in the middle at any point to turn the alarm off.”