Project14 | Winners Announcement: Owning Time With Smart Alarm Clocks!

Smart Alarm Clock

Enter Your Electronics & Design Project for Your Chance to Win a $100 Shopping Cart!

Back to The Project14 homepage

Project14 Home

Monthly Themes

Monthly Theme Poll

Congratulations to kk99 for Self-adjusting clock with e-display and guycarver for Object Sensing Clock !

You are the winners of the Smart Alarm Clock competition from Project14 !

"The time we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains." - Marcel Proust, author of In Search of Lost Time

kk99 made a self-adjusting smart alarm clock using an e-ink display and an Arduino.

gcarver had trouble sleeping at night so he used an temperature sensor to trigger the display. Now, he only has to wave his hand to turn the display on or off.

This theme was an opportunity to think about time. The Greeks used two different words for time, chronos for chronological time and kairos for qualitative time. Cronos governed linear and chronological time while kairos defined qualitative moments of time in relation to action, when conditions were set for the accomplishment of a crucial action, an opportune and decisive moment. Indian philosophy had a cyclical view of time, a so called Wheel of Time, wherein the universe undergoes repeated cycles of destruction and rebirth to give rise to repeating ages over the infinite life of the universe.

The Wheel of Time concept can be found in Hinduism and Buddhism, the Ancient Greek Orphics and Pythagoreans, the Mayans, the Q'ero Indians of Peru, and the Hopi Indians of Arizona. The wheel concept, thinking of time as endlessly repeating cycles could perhaps be the drawn out conclusion to observable phenomena such as the cyclical alteration of day and night, the monthly cycle of the moon, and the annual cycle of the seasons.

Ancient Greek philosophers believed time and the universe was infinite with no beginning or end. For Aristotle, time does not exist independently of events that occur in time, time is something dependent on change, its "a number of change" in respect to the before and after. Newton believed in absolute space and time; time passes uniformly without regard to what's happening in the world. Einstein's relativity theory turned our Newtonian view of time on its head. According to relativity, our perception of "now" is a construct of the mind, time is no longer a sequence of events that happen, time does not pass or flow, and the past, present, and future exist simultaneously.

Relativity makes time travel possible:

Early this year, in March of 2018, Stephen Hawking, the man who once held the same seat in Cambridge as Isaac Newton, passed away, but not before reshaping our contemporary perception of time and space. According to Hawking, the universe and therefore time had a beginning, approximately 15 billion years, and beginning with his A Brief History of Time, he devoted his life's work to finding a unifying theory of time. With the help of the mathematician Roger Penrose, he was able to expound upon Einstein's theory of relativity, tracing the origins of time and space to a single point of zero size and infinite density, giving mathematical expression to Big Bang Theory, initially proposed by Georges Le Maitre in 1927, and confirmed two years later with Edwin Hubble's discovery that the universe was contracting. He later tried marrying relativity with quantum theory, proposing that space and time were finite, and that time has an end.

Without further ado here are your winners for the Smart Alarm Clock Competition...

The Winners

Self-adjusting clock with e-display by kk99

kk99 set out to make a self-adjusting clock, making it work with CET time zone and supporting daylight savings. For the source of time, he used a GPS signal received from a NEO-7M module that had a serial port, a 2.9 inch module with e-ink display, and connected all this to an Arduino Nano. This is a really interesting application of e-ink technology that uses a low-powered Arduino and automatically updates using smart technology. He provides schematics and source code which can be used to expand this project even further!

Also on Project14 by kk99

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Object Sensing Clock by guycarver

This was the first Project14 from guycarver and it was a definite winner. If you've ever been annoyed by the glowing LED from traditional alarm clock, this smart alarm clock uses an IR Temperature sensor as the trigger for the display. Simply wave your hand and it will turn on when you want to see the time at night. He came up with this solution to prevent the light from keeping him up at night and provides source code at https://github.com/GuyCarver/raspi/tree/master/projects/clock !

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Honorable Mentions

Tempus Fugit by balearicdynamics

Tempus Fugit is usually translated as "Time Flies" or "it escapes, irretrievable time." It's also the title for the seventeenth episode of the fourth season of X-Files. In that episode, following a plane crash, agents Mulder and Scully notice a 9 minute disparity between the crash and the time on the victim's wristwatch, indicating missing time. Of course their were aliens involved...

This project by balearicdynamics was added to the honorable mentions list for Smart Alarm Clock because like the winners, its another strong entry and if not for "missing time" most certainly would have been a winner. As time would have it, the idea to make a smart clock was not ibalearicdynamics's mind until a few weeks ago, when he found an incredible nice alarm clock of the past century. Alex is a digital alarm clock, dating back to 1978. It was only partially working and therefore could be had on the cheap.

Also on Project14 from balearicdynamics :

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The example project came from the AIS Alarm project and is worth mentioning. The objective is to develop an open source AIS Alarm that alerts sailors that a new marine vessel with AIS is within range. AIS (Automatic Identification System) is a tracking system for ships that gives information on among other things location, direction, and speed. It is required on vessels of 300 or more gross tonnage and all passenger ships.

AIS Alarm by fmilburn

Also on Project14 from fmilburn:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Topsy Turvy Clock by Workshopshed

You don't have permission to edit metadata of this video.

Edit media

Dimensions x
Subject (required) Brief Description Tags (separated by comma) Video visibility in search results
Parent content

Poster
Upload Preview

While not a smart alarm clock this is also a really cool build. The hands are independently controlled with 2 stepper motors that also have a slotted disk which allows them to "home" and hence know their start position.

Also on Project14 by Workshopshed

What's Happening Now

There's always stuff going on in the community so if you ran out of time for the Smart Alarm Competition you can suggest a similar idea in the Monthly Poll as well as vote on which of the community member's ideas you want to see happen next. You can also join the Movers and Shakers competition by building any project that moves or shakes or the Solar Power Devices competition to build any project that harvests the energy of the sun to create a solar device.

Thank you for continued support of Project14 !

Keep inspiring others with your videos, have fun, and be creative. Your only limit is your imagination and well... time!