The World's Most Devious Alarm Clock

wired_parrot writes "If you have trouble waking up, try this: MIT media lab has created an alarm clock that, when you press the snooze bar, runs off into a corner, a different hiding place every day. Try hitting the snooze bar again now!"

Comments

A simpler solution

[the packrat]

Wouldn't it be easier to just set the snooze button to give you a slowly increasing electric shock?

Re:The typical things Slashdot users will say:

[ackthpt]

"Just don't press the snooze button and keep your current alarm clock!" "Why not just get up when the alarm goes off the first time? I always wake up and face the day with a smile." "I disabled the snooze button on my clock so I always have to get up"

fsck dat. I got a wind up alarm clock years ago and stick with it. It's devious enough that it has the deviousness to get faster during the damn night (change in spring temperature?) Can't say I've ever missed a wake-up that I've really needed. Take these windup clocks on trips too, can't trust power and such.

This is new?

[thogard]

Last year I bought something that does this at the local pet shop but it doesn't have a snooze button. Its also seems to be permanently set to about 1/4 hour after sunrise or whenever the traffic starts picking up in the morning, which ever is earliest.

For an project for an Engineering class, I built an alarm clock based on an a 6811 board. It could decode a signal from WWV so it never needed setting and it had some advanced alarm features such as figuring out when the lights went out to decide how much to advance the wake up time. It also could cope with the later classes on Tue and Thur and beep in a non threatening way around noon or so on Sat and Sunday.

It also had a temperature sensor and a humidity sensor so it if it was very cold or raining then it would go off about 10 minutes early. If it was real dark and wet and cold, then it wouldn't go off at all. For some reason, the professor didn't like that feature.

Re:You know . . .

[Quantum Fizz]

Kids in the Hall (IIRC) had the best idea for an alarm clock, as a fake commercial.

The 'alarm' sound consisted of the most annoying recordings of your mom nagging you in her most obnoxious tone to get out of bed.

But not just that - there was no snooze or power off. The only way to turn it off was to get onto the connected exercise bike that came with a heart monitor. You then had to pedal until your heart rate hit some critical value to turn off the alarm, at which point you wouldn't go back to sleep.

A funny skit, but totally brilliant as well.

Another option

[Tom]

Not only do I know the problem (I used to need almost an hour to get out of bed), I also was wasted for the first 2-3 hours of every day.

Until I bought a "dawn simulator". here's one, there are many others.
Essentially, it's just a bright light, with a matte glass so it spreads out a little (you can actually look into it without hurting your eyes, even though it's bright enough to light up the room).
What it does is dim it up slowly. Really slowly. Mine can be programmed to start at 90, 60 or 30 minutes prior to "wakeup time".
So I need to get up at 7 am. At 6:30, it will start to slowly dim up the light, reaching full brightness at 7 am, at which time it also sounds a soft alarm. By that time, however, I'm usually already awake.

I was a bit reluctant until I said "what the heck" one day and just tried it (found a vendor with a 21-day money-back-no-questions-asked policy).

The concept is that it simulates dawn, triggering your natural processes of waking up. A normal alarm clock just shakes you out of bed, and leaves it to you to become awake over the next few hours or so.