Adventures in Electrostatic

Networked Alarm p.2

Published by Tom on November 5, 2007 04:13 pm under Networked Objects, Physical Computing

Since our last installment of the Networked alarm, we’ve made a few changed and advancements. (Man that sounded very government scientificy) First, Kacie joined me to make this a group project, which is great. Along with her came a very important concept: social networking. We wanted to make the process of waking up a more meaningful/rewarding experience, and we figured involving your friends/family would do that.

At first, we wanted to have audio messages from your friends/family wake you up in the morning when you got up and turned off the alarm. That turned out to be impractical for the technology we are using. So we turned to written messages instead. In some ways, little text messages are more intimate and cute (especially with the little LCD screens we got). AND, with text messages we can easily connect the system to Facebook and other social-networking platforms.

So this is how there system works:
In the morning your alarm goes off. The alarm randomly picks one of the several nodes you have around your house, and tells it to start making noise. You wake up from the noise that the node is making, and get out of bed. Once up, you have to figure out which node is making noise. Once you figure it out, you walk over to the node and press it to stop its noise. If you woke up and got over to the node fast enough, you are lucky and a message is displayed. The message is from one of your friends or family on the Facebook. Each day, there is a blank on the ‘Networked Alarm Clock’s owner’s Facebook profile where one person can input a message. The next day, that message is delivered to you at the alarm node.

If you are slow getting out of bed and over to the node, the message is not displayed and you miss it… forever. There is no way to recover your lost messages, so its an incentive to get out of bed.

In the last bit of the process, an email is sent to the person who wrote the message to you, telling them if you got the message or not, and when. If, on a day, no one leaves you a message, a default message is displayed which the owner sets. This could be a reminder or inspiration, whatever.

That is where we conceptually are.
Physically, we have work to do. This second week though, we have the wireless communication working, and the alarm clock hacked and accessible.

OH, and if you want to know more, see the pdf Presentation.