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.
The appearance of the aforementioned alarm clock (whose name I have been unable to find again) was like your everyday twin-bell alarm clock, but to set the time and manage alarms it provided a companion mobile app that communicated with the clock via Bluetooth, offloading the UI to a much more capable device, your smartphone. Combined with a microcontroller, this allowed it to store as many alarm schedules as you could ever need, just like using your smartphone’s clock app. To me it seemed like a great way to allow for digital timekeeping on an analog device, without burdening the user with a complex UI comprised of physical button presses, nor breaking the minimalist appearance with a digital display. From a technical standpoint though, there is nothing extraordinarily complex about this, or any other part of the clock – it was only a novel concept in the world of consumer alarm clocks, where innovation is remarkably nonexistent. This lack of innovation is what motivated me to create something that can satisfy the needs of a digital society without sacrificing the analog alarm bell and quaint appearance of a traditional clock.
Given that, my goal with this project is to provide a clock with the following, ranked from highest priority to lowest:
- Physical alarm bell
- Scheduled/repeating alarms without restrictions
- Analog face
- Rechargeable battery
- Lasts 6+ months per charge
- Low-battery indicator
- Automatic daylight savings transition
- Runs on both battery and power cable
- Self-setting/self-correcting time
- Possibly a gradual alarm (optional)
- Possibly alarm volume control (optional)
Since I am a computer engineer – not a mechanical engineer – I decided to start by taking an off-the-shelf alarm clock with good mechanical parts such as the clock motor and alarm bells, rather than starting from scratch. In Part II of this series, I will go over how I created a design plan from these requirements, including solving the most difficult design problem of this project – creating a digital interface for storing and reading the time from the position of the clock hands.