“The wall-mounted light simulates a sunrise 15 minutes before your alarm; so you can wake up to a sunrise any time of day!
Story
I always say that I’m a morning person in theory. I have had trouble getting up in the morning since I was in high school. Getting up is even harder if you frequently have to get up (even for part of the year) before the sun rises! Enter the sunrise alarm clock. This wall-mounted light will simulate a sunrise 15 minutes before your alarm. Follow along and see how I built it!
Project Summary (TL;DR)
The sunrise alarm clock has 40 RGB LEDs. These LEDs are individually addressable, so it can display some neat animations. The main purpose of the light is to simulate a sunrise that occurs over 15 minutes before your alarm. Here is a short demo video of the alarm in action and some photos of the setup:
A Raspberry Pi hosts a webserver which is accessible only on my local network. I can connect to this webserver using my laptop, phone, etc by entering the PI’s IP address and port into my web browser (ex. 192.168.0.16:4000). This webserver is how I configure the light and the alarm. The raspberry pi has an RS232 connection to the microcontroller that drives the LED ring. The microcontroller has a set of commands that the RPI uses to configure the current mode being displayed on the LED ring.
This sunrise alarm clock is part of a bigger project. This will actually be an add-on module to an internet connected alarm clock. I want to create an alarm clock base that will sit on my nightstand and replace the Raspberry Pi. This base would have a real-time clock, WIFI capabilities, a display to show the time, and a speaker. The sunrise light module will plug in to the back of the alarm clock so the alarm clock can trigger the sunrise before the alarm goes off.
Enclosure
The enclosure was designed with the help of my friend, and was 3D printed using white PLA filament. I am very new to 3D printing; this was actually my first 3D print ever!
The front of the enclosure has an area for the LED ring to fit in, and an area for a 6-inch diameter, 3mm thick piece of plexiglass to fit in. The LED ring and the plexiglass are distanced from each other to allow for some diffusion.”