Inspiration

Do you hit the snooze button too often? Do you ever shut off your alarm and go back to sleep, only to wake up late? I, like millions of other Americans, suffer from this affliction. To fully wake up, I need to do something that engages me before getting to the snooze button. That's why the MorningRizrs® alarm clock was created.

What it does

The MorningRizrs alarm clock requires the user to achieve a preset score on a game of snake before it turns off.

How we built it

To build the MorningRizr, we first built a standard alarm using the LCD screen. We then built a snake game using the analog joystick. My partner and I did these steps independently, so we merged our code and hardware in the next step, then added in the code that would turn off the alarm once the user got a score of 3 in the snake game. Lastly, we connected the Bluetooth hardware and reprogrammed the snake game code to receive inputs from the Bluetooth instead of the joystick.

Challenges we ran into

We initially struggled with the code for the snake game. First off, it was based on snake game code available online, but this code was written for different hardware. Thus, we had to do a lot of troubleshooting to make it work on our Arduino. In addition to this, we had to override the old code to make it communicate with the Bluetooth device, so we spent lots of time writing new code and modifying the old.

Lastly, we did not have much space on our original Arduino, so we had to recode some things and add an additional breadboard to have enough space for the entire product. This turned out nicely, though, since having everything on one breadboard would have been unappealing.

What we learned

We learned how to program and troubleshoot the dot matrix and LCD display, both of which were new to us. We also learned how to program code that could interact with Bluetooth inputs, expanding on our knowledge of Bluefruit from class.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were especially proud of making the Bluetooth snake game; despite the brilliance of our development team, we were afraid that we would not be able to control the game via/Bluetooth.

Hardware

Arduino Uno / Joystick / 8x8 LED dot matrix / LCD Display / Potentiometer (2) / Bluefruit Connector

Software

Link to our code and libraries needed to run the code: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fGDxqwsEonQrp9g__68RO7gzE1XfQibM?usp=sharing

Link to original snake game code: https://mrarduinoprojects.blogspot.com/2020/02/arduino-snake-game.html

What's next for MorningRizr

We would like to change the format to a full alarm clock instead of a timer. We did not do this because it made more sense to use a timer in the context of a demo product. After that, we would like to build in protections so the user cannot tear the alarm out instead of playing the game.

Built With

• arduino
• bluefruit