I built my daughter a custom alarm clock because everything on Amazon sucked

I built my daughter a custom alarm clock because everything on Amazon sucked(reclaimtheday.substack.com)

14 points by pneedleman 2 hours ago | 5 comments

pneedleman 2 hours ago |

My daughter had an iPad and would listen to it at night. Eyes glued to a screen at bedtime drove my wife and me crazy. It would also just keep playing indefinitely unless I remembered to go in and turn it off, along with having to manually manage her Yoto alarm on holidays and school breaks. We wanted her to be more independent and listen to music WITHOUT a tablet in bed.

I ended up building my own because I couldn't find anything on the market without microphones that also had a Spotify controller. This has been going strong in her room for ~1 month now. Features include, alarm sync'd with her school district days off, weather (and alerts), Spotify, Hue, Sleep timer, parent dashboard, and much more.

raylad 59 minutes ago | |

Looks cool but you may want to rethink the blue LED for an alarm clock, because blue light interferes with sleep.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthy-aging-and-longevity/b...

pneedleman 27 minutes ago | | |

100% - the screen automatically turns off at night based on Sunset time, and turns back on at sunrise (unless alarm goes off before).

You can also get a classic green or color display with negative display and use custom backlight colors (https://www.adafruit.com/product/399)

bdangubic 2 hours ago | |

fantastic. i would easily pay $150 for a product like this

pneedleman 1 hour ago | | |

wow, means a ton. my daughter has actually been insisting that I sell them and had to get her approval to open-source the code this week.

Code and materials are on my github: https://github.com/pneedleman/reclaim-spotify-clock The off-the-shelf hardware runs around $60.

If enough folks would rather have a pre-assembled plug-and-play kit instead of soldering it themselves, I might seriously look into doing a small-batch run or Kickstarter.