Alarm Pad

Inspiration

We all know how counterproductive it is to sleep 3 extra hours every morning because you snoozed your alarm that one time. Well, we have a solution. With Alarm Pad, you will have to physically step up on the board for the alarm to stop sounding.

What it does

You set your alarm through a web server running on Raspberry Pi. Now when it goes off on the sound-clapper, the only way to stop it is to get out of your bed and step on the alarm-pad. That makes a closed circuit and sends a message to Raspberry Pi to stop sounding it.

How we built it

We built two hardware components and programmed the Raspberry Pi to hook everything together. The first thing was the alarm pad itself. That was two plywoods with Aluminium strips on either end and springs in between. The other thing was the sound clapper for sounding the alarm; that was built by mounting a battery on top of a wooden piece and having a metallic strip attached to it bat against two big pieces of Aluminium foil. The Raspberry Pi hosts the web server that manages setting and stopping the alarm.

Challenges we ran into

Hardware and getting it to work with Raspberry Pi.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The sound clapper. The hardware lab did not have any sound sensors, so we built our own!

What we learned

We learned a lot about hacking hardware and putting pieces together. A lot of members on our team had little to no experience with screwguns, wood-cutters etc.

What's next for Alarm Pad

We want to integrate Pebble so that every time you hit snooze on it instead of getting out of your bed and stepping on the pad, the watch-app pays your friend a dollar.