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Wake Me Gently

Made by Aditi Chalisgaonkar

Found in Home Hack

I have many friends whose day starts off badly if they aren’t woken up gently. Loud and harsh alarms are not a good way for them to wake up. It is for them that I will make an alarm which wakes them up gently. This will wake up the sleeper slowly by exposing them to more and more light. It simulates the way that humans are conditioned to wake up as the sun rises, and by the time the sun/light is bright, the sleeper has been brought gently out of deep sleep and into a more wakeful state. The alarm will check for movement about 45 minutes prior to the set alarm time and if any movement is detected, it will start the lighting up process then. If no movement is detected, it will start to light up any way, half an hour prior to the set time. It them increases in brightness slowly (for about half an hour) in the time before your alarm is set to ring. At the time that the alarm is set for, the user will receive an SMS asking them to wake up.

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Bill of Materials

  1. Particle
  2. Breadboard
  3. LED
  4. Resistor
  5. PIR sensor
  6. Phone 
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Intention

I made this device because most people I know don't like to wake up in the morning, especially not in a harsh manner. I wanted to bring a good start to the beginning of someone's day.

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Context

I have been fascinated by Phillips' wake up light for sometime, and the principle of  waking up gently is borrowed from here. Additionally, I have heard (and experienced) that it is better and easier to wake someone when they are sleeping lightly rather than deeply. Knowing this, I added a PIR sensor to check for when a sleeper is moving, and have programmed the wake up light to coordinate itself with this feedback.

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Process

I had a hard time picking this project, partially because I was constantly rejecting ideas as not good enough. I realized that we were actually supposed to learn about IoT, so I picked something that was happy and moved on.

The first thing I did was to make sure that the various parts worked separately - the LED, fading it in and out, the PIR sensor, sending and receiving messages, and allowing the user to turn on and off the alarm through these messages.

I then added them together piece by piece and refined my code until it all worked as it was meant to. 

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Product

In making the product described above, I used various predefined functions, such as Time.hour(). I also used the IFTTT platform, to ensure that my particle picked up the SMS's sent by the user 



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Reflection

Upon reflecting on this process, I might simplify the project that I set out to make, considering the time frame of one week. I would also be more careful about small coding slip ups. 

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I have many friends whose day starts off badly if they aren’t woken up gently. Loud and harsh alarms are not a good way for them to wake up. It is for them that I will make an alarm which wakes them up gently. This will wake up the sleeper slowly by exposing them to more and more light. It simulates the way that humans are conditioned to wake up as the sun rises, and by the time the sun/light is bright, the sleeper has been brought gently out of deep sleep and into a more wakeful state.
The alarm will check for movement about 45 minutes prior to the set alarm time and if any movement is detected, it will start the lighting up process then.
If no movement is detected, it will start to light up any way, half an hour prior to the set time. It them increases in brightness slowly (for about half an hour) in the time before your alarm is set to ring.
At the time that the alarm is set for, the user will receive an SMS asking them to wake up.

Created

January 26th, 2017