Alarm Cock

Inspiration

Our inspiration for the Alarm Cock was, as you could guess, an alarm clock. However, we wanted to create more than just an alarm clock, we wanted to create something bigger and better. We wanted to create something that did more than yell at you from across the room, we created a device that would really motivate you to get out of bed in the mornings. The face is the part of the body that is most likely to stay in the same place so we chose to interact with that part of the body and a cock was an animal known for making a lot of noise in the morning waking you up, hopefully a correlation that would help wake you up more effectively.

What it does

The Alarm Cock is a interactive alarm clock that stimulates more than just one sense. Instead of just stimulating your hearing the Alarm Cock goes one step further and stimulates your sense of touch as well. For those deep sleepers it is a great way to assure a timely wake up as very few can sleep through the "gentle prodding" of the Alarm Cock for you to awaken. Taking an input of minutes until the alarm should go off the Alarm Cock triggers an alarm after the specified time period and triggers the mechanical module as well as emits an alarm sound so wake you and get you going on your day.

How I built it

The Alarm Cock was build using an arduino, a motor, two batteries, a rubber chicken, a phone, a laptop, a bread board, wires, a box, and a LOT of duct tape! Split into two main sections, hardware and software, the Alarm Cock was fairly challenging for us to assemble. On the hardware side we used the arduino and the bread board to create a control system for the motor which rotates the rubber chicken. Housed in a box sealed with duct tape this is our alarm module. On the software side we used Android Studio to code an android mobile app for alarm control and arduino for the motor control. We then linked to two components together with Bluetooth to create a unified system.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge we had was lack of experience with the tools we were using. None of us knew how to use the android development environment so we were all researching and learning together. This was nice to do but also very slow and time consuming. This meant what all of our time estimations fell behind and we had a lot of trouble keeping up with what we wanted to get done. In the end we weren't able to complete all the desired functions because we didn't know how to do the required actions and ran out of time to research and test new methods of achieving what we wanted.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our whole group is proud of our final project. Over the 22 hours of hacking we ran into a large number of problems spanning a variety of topics. We even came to a point where we had decided to throw in the towel. The group came together and made a resulting product we can all be proud of. We are most proud of our ability to persevere and to learn quickly as that was our biggest problem and most vital success.

What I learned

For all three members of the group this weekend was a new experience as we were all learning android app development from scratch. Only one of the three members had been to an hackathon before so not only did we build technical knowledge about Java coding and the android studio development environment, we also learned about hackathons and what to expect from them in the future. It was a great experience for all of us, all 22 hours of it.

What's next for Alarm Cock

Future developments of the Alarm Cock include expanding customization of the alarm options, creating a more user friendly user interface and information return method, and lowering the power of the motor to hopefully achieve a more even rotation of the rubber chicken. This will create a better user experience and a more reliable result to our users.