AlarmPi: The Raspberry Pi Smart Alarm Clock

When I left my previous job around 18 months ago, I promised myself I’d do something productive with the time I had between employment. During that time, I realised how much I hated my alarm clock going off every morning, and also how stupid and inflexible most alarm clocks are. I managed to achieve very little with that spare time between jobs, but this hatred of alarm clocks has been driven home even further since I’ve started working shifts in my new job – no alarm clock I could find had the ability to vary the alarm time based on a shift pattern (I suppose that’s a fairly niche feature!), and very few had decent internet radio connectivity to allow me to listen to music I like in the morning.

That productive feeling drew me to buy some parts from Adafruit and have a play with some electronics projects – the furthest I got was playing around with a LCD display as documented in this other blog post. More recently, my old alarm clock started to fail in rather interesting ways (ever been woken up at 3:27AM by a piercing screaming & static noise?), so I decided it was time to build my own, and the AlarmPi was born!

The core of the project is a Raspberry Pi connected up to a series of fairly basic components, all controlled by a Python script which takes input from all manner of sources, and shows information through the two front displays. I’ve put together a short video explaining some of the main features which can be viewed below, and you can read more about the AlarmPi on the project page