Hello, and welcome to the first part in my “Designing a Smart Analog Clock” series!
To start off, let me explain what this is about: I am a very heavy sleeper, and my phone alarm is not loud enough to wake me up most of the time. Instead, I use an old-fashioned analog alarm clock with a physical bell that’s loud enough to wake me up on time. The problem, though, is that I lose out on all the features of an alarm clock app – no alarm schedules, snoozing, or automatic daylight savings changeover. With a strong desire to have the best of both worlds, I spent hours researching to find any existing products that supported full alarm scheduling. It turns it there are not one, but two that exist – well, that used to exist. The first had been released and discontinued long ago, with very little information available online; the second was more modern and had also been discontinued, but thankfully it was well-documented online, and its elegant design led me to use it as inspiration for this project.