Circadia

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  A picture of our website UI

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  The electronics inside the lamp

The Problem

Circadia is designed to combat the ongoing "sleepiness epidemic" by allowing people to get back in tune with their circadian rhythms. It's no secret that college students hate getting up early, but maybe the problem isn't when we get up, but rather how we get up.

The Solution

Circadia is a beautiful, simple sunrise lamp designed for college students. For thousands of years, humans have used the sun as an alarm, giving us an alternative "wakeup signal" that we can tap into. Instead of blaring a sound, our lamp emulates a sunrise, starting off warm and dim and slowly ramping up the brightness until it's the color of daylight. Although other sunrise lamps exist, they are either too expensive to appeal to college students, or designed for usage on a bedside table which college students don't have.

How we built it

The lamp base is made out of chipboard, and the diffuser is a sheet of paper with over 200 handmade folds! The microcontroller is a WiFi-capable ESP32, and there is a 3000K and 6000K LED strips to emit warm and cold light.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• It took almost four hours to completely fold the diffuser. It was worth it!
• The lamp is very responsive, and the "aura" indicator on the website aligns with neumorphic design principles, a goal of ours.

What's next for Circadia

By monitoring the WiFi signals that bounce off of the user, it's possible to make a simple presence detector that is non-invasive and reliable. In future iterations, this can be used to detect whether or not the user is in bed.

Built With

• c
• esp-idf
• html5
• javascript