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World's Biggest Alarm Clock Shakes You Out of Bed
tugfoigel writes "Built by "Kevin" for a contest, this computer-controlled alarm clock is touted as the world's largest. To be more specific, he 'mounted a large air cylinder to the head of [his] bed and a valve, controlled by a computer, which [he programmed] to wake [him] up in the morning.'"
Some kid strapped a computer controlled jack-hammer to his bed.
Call the press! They must report this to the whole world immediately!
From the picture it looks like it is going to wake his head up into a dresser.
Upon watching the video I was half right.
[20:36] wwwdot/.dotorg
I'd still roll over and fall back to sleep; and never remember the alarm going off. The only things that ever remotely worked were my sister growing up and Sepultura's Ratamahatta. Part of the latter was my kitten going nuts when it went off.
Health Freedom is almost as popular as Freedom itself.
Sex used to be a form of exercise... But exercise is for losers! He built a machine to do the work for him!
It will sure help getting off to work in the morning!!
can you imagine living with this guy?
I'd rather just not get up at all.
Waking up naturally is far better for your health. All you 9-5ers have fun being shocked out of bed every morning.
In soviet Russia, clock alarms YOU!
"The hay" hits YOU !
Sex just that much more interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exorcist_(film)
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
"Did you notice it's a twin bed?"
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
He has a big [pneumatic] rig.
Remember it is the size of the cylinder that counts!
...Hang on...
Get your mind out of the gutter!
Leave it to a geek to invent the greatest sex bed the world has ever seen and then use it to jostle his brain into jelly in order to wake up in the morning.
Google is failing me now finding the video... but I remember reading about something SO much better almost 10 years ago.
A Japanese engineer designed an integrated alarm clock bed for a contest his company put on. The bed would go through a series of increasing "motivations" to wake up, including:
1. a normal alarm
2. a recording of his boss yelling "Wake up! You're going to be late!"
3. water spraying on his face
4. a hydraulic lift that slowly raises the head of the bed until the apparently ridiculously sound sleeper gets dumped on the floor
And this was back when creating said device was an actual embedded system, not just plugging a serial cable from your computer into a big motor and writing a few lines of code to make it go...
Guaranteed karma points to anyone who can find the video...
This is nice and all, but I still prefer Gun O'Clock.
He'll also wake up alone every morning...
One of the attractions in the 'Crystal Palace' was the 'Alarm Bed' which tipped you out of bed.
bed shakers (or, more often, pillow vibrators) are very common devices for waking deaf people. Take a look here.
That's actually a pretty quiet alarm clock, considering what its doing. Too bad for every new bed I buy, he'll have bought 7.
There are two ways to wake up in the morning.
1. The sun gently rolling its warmth over the mountains, gently caressing your face and rousing your subtly to start your day.
2. A tiger jumping out of the bushes.
I wonder which one this is?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
To the man who hacks into his bed and reprograms it to catapult him through the ceiling!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I saw something that was for all practical purposes identical, on black-and-white TV when I was a small child. This is not news. Or original at all.
This sort of 'shaking bed' is nothing new. Simular mechanisims are used as alarmclocks by deaf people. Maybe the force with which the bed is shaken is a new quality, but the basic concept has been around for a decade or two at least.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Luckily there's not much chance of him ever needing a double bed, because that would be a real pain in the ass to rewire.
I took my dads old vibrating sander and zap strapped it under my bed, then plugged it into an electric timer which was plugged in to the wall. it was the only thing that would wake me up,
mc
This guy seems eager for attention anyway. I have seen this very same video about half a year ago. Can't find the original anywhere, of course...
Do the head aches last as long as proper ones induced by beer?
And if they do, what's the ROI considering you save on beer?
FRA: STFU GTFO
Secondly, and more significantly, that kind of vigorous bashing about is not good for brain cells. 3 years of this, 5 days a week at least, can't have done him much good.
Ho hum - mildly clever to put it all together, but a dumb idea overall
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
weird ass bed
LOL it's a twin sized bed
What girl will be over "sleeping"o in that thing with him. Wow, talk about excluding yourself from any chance of mating..
..........FULL STOP.
Or for that matter any other earthquake-prone area of the world. The habituation to being shaken awake might prove to be his undoing.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
... the corpse can go on top !
The bazooka wake-up call. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJsK059gVDg Almost certain to give you a heart-attack...
I seem to remember Wallace's bed not only (sort of) waking him but dressing him and plopping him down for breakfast (toast, jelly and CHEESE!). It worked most of the time. Of course they are just clay figurines so maybe this isn't a valid comparison.
single bed, jackhammer. In the right hands this could be kinky. Instead, just sad.
This used to happen to me all the time. I think about something then later in the day, that same thing pops up! I'm not talking about finding a quarter on the ground, I'm talking about insanly odd things. This morning, I was wondering how deaf people wake themselves up in the morning, then I get into work and see THIS!
"The Y chromosome is genetic. The odds are very good that if you are male then your father was too." -Internet Commenter
Evidently you guys/gals never lived near a rail line, OR met my ex-wife
For the kids. I won't have a problem getting them up again.
But you can get pretty much the same thing without all the hassle that guy must have gone through to build his. http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/lights/8f1a/
Back in the mid-70s, I built my fourth and final electronic clock (one for each year of high school)... this one was designed to match my stereo system. And it included a relay, to turn on the stereo system (well, actually a quadraphonic system.. this was the 70s, after all), so that I could wake to full volume rock music. That thing is only slightly larger than one of my speakers!
-Dave Haynie
Has anyone compared it to the size of the original alarm clocks, the water clocks in European monasteries?
Clever. John Muir did something like this as a kid in the 1840s. He built a contraption to eject him from his bed and wake him so he could read in the pre-dawn hours (see bottom of p.225 in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth). It also lit a lamp at the same time and after a few minutes books to be studied were pushed from a rack. Now that's impressive.
Oddly enough, I've heard you can get clocks in Japan with a little-sister voice telling her brother to wake up, or audio CDs of the same that you can use with CD player alarms.
That's a pretty massive pneumatic cyclinder for the job needed. It looks like you'd need quite a large collection tank to maintain pressure.
I'd complain that the compressor would make a lot of noise, but if this guy requires this to wake up, I'm guessing he could have the compressor in his room and he wouldn't notice. I'm guessing he's running hose down to a basement or garage air unit.
If I was designing this system, I probably would have mounted the cylinder rod to the floor with a alignment coupler instead of letting it drive into some plywood. I bet the walls around the bed are pretty messed up from the bed banging against it.
If this guy needs this violent of a wake-up scheme, perhaps the cost of these materials would have been better used towards some medical attention?
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
Fat & lazy people need only apply.
My gosh... i'm surprised he hasn't broken his neck yet. It leads me to think that heavy sleepers are weak in the gene pool and should be eliminated but evolution. (e.g. my house is on fire... turn over... zzzzzz)
I once had an early morning job interview that I really didn't want to be late for. As I'm a heavy sleeper, I was a bit worried about it -- my solution was to plug a vacuum cleaner into my clock radio (which had a switched outlet on the back). That did the trick!
I bet he designed and built this while working late at night drinking copious amounts of coffee or caffeinated beverages. I wonder why he needed to take such drastic measures to get out of bed? Z/
What other people think of me is none of my business
I call it...the sun.
Where's the air compressor? I have one in my garage, and the compressor itself would make enough noise to wake me up, if it were inside the house.
Of course, what I WANT in my house is a nice, expensive, belt-driven air compressor in the basement that serves the whole house like in a science building or workshop. No more canned air, and no more dragging my keyboard to the garage to clean it. :-)
Can't the dude just not be stoned while sleeping?
"They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal!"
This is nothing new; I went to the Rochester Institute of Technology [accompanied by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf] and they've used vibrating beds as alarms for the deaf students for years. And pray you don't end up on a deaf floor when the fire alarms go off-- between the strobe lights, sirens and vibrations, you'd be be ready to huddle under a desk and wait for the bombs to drop.
This may have been said before, just thought it was funny, and probably fitting, that he still sleeps in single bed, go figure.