Outcome

Bill of Materials

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

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.

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.

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. 

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 

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.