My husband can attest to this - when the alarm goes off in the morning, I walk around the bed, across the room, hit the snooze button, and go back to bed - while asleep. :smack:
As you can tell, I have an old stupid alarm clock. Snooze goes off every 9 minutes for an hour, then gives up on me. And lately I’ve been hitting the snooze through the whole hour and not realizing it.
So today I realized that what I really need is an alarm clock that knows if I’m in bed and will keep bugging me (at increasingly short periods) until I get up.
Now, I’m a programmer, so if I can get the right hardware, I could probably make this work, but I don’t know even what to search for.
I have a laptop in the bedroom and I have a smartphone (although I would prefer not to use the smartphone - I prefer to keep the ringer off so it won’t disturb people at work)
I need something that can register that I am still in bed, and communicate that to another computer. Is there something like that on the market? Will I need to make that with hardware & a Raspberry Pi?
If you really are asking for a Maker type solution them you could try an Arduino, a Real Time Clock (RTC) module, a pressure sensor and a buzzer. That should keep you up programming for a while.
ETA: You can substitute the Raspberry Pi for the Arduino and RTC module.
I mean, aside from the complicated solutions, let me suggest something:
I use an alarm clock app on my phone. I can let it work like a normal alarm clock, or I can force it to make me enter a randomized captcha before it’ll let me turn it off. That lets me snooze it normally, but it will never stop coming back with an alarm until I wake up enough to enter the captcha and turn the alarm off.
That doesn’t seem like enough for you. So, it has an additional feature I could turn on where before I’m allowed to snooze I have to answer a math problem. So every snooze is another math problem. In addition, the alarm can be made to get incrementally louder until it is at max volume. If that combined with a series of math problems doesn’t wake you up, well…you don’t want to get up, and that sounds like your real problem.
ETA: All good smartphone alarm apps have an option to work independently of your device settings for volume, otherwise they wouldn’t be any good. They’ll go off even if your phone is on silent, without taking your phone out of silent.
Get one of the “shock pads” used to keep cats from scratching, dogs from getting on furniture, etc.
Rig it to an alarm.
Once the alarm has been silenced, the shock pad is energized.
You can shut off the alarm, but not go back to bed.
You can stay in bed and try to sleep with the alarm going.
You can’t turn off the alarm AND go back to bed.
Obviously, the wiring of the pad has to be such as to prevent a simple disconnect. I like the cage with padlock. Now find a lock which gets a new combination every use - the combination is displayed for 2 minutes. If you can’t enter it in 2 minutes, the combi changes and you start over.
Or use a capcha.
Before programming your own or buying the kind that takes off on you, I’d suggest one of the 8 million available for download to your smartphone. Most of them have several options that may fit your needs. You can adjust the snooze, both how long between snooze times (as well as diminishing times), whether or not it stops going off after a set amount of time (X snoozes or just a continuations alarm), you can pick a really loud obnoxious ringtone that jolts you out of bed or, probably your best bet, set the ‘snooze’ to either a CAPTCHA or math problem. When I did that, trying to retype (keeping in mind this was on a smartphone keypad xY3h$j^, was usually enough to do the trick or at least give me the willpower to say ‘Okay, I’m awake now, just don’t lay back down…don’t lay back down…don’t lay back down’
Also, with an alarm on your smartphone, another thing I do is set multiple alarms. I HAVE to be out of bed by, say 7:15, so I set an alarm for 6:13 and one for 6:37, with the diminishing snoozes, even if I don’t remember hitting them, they’re quickly going off all most simultaneously. Granted, that still requires the will power to not just turn the off and lay back down, but hitting snooze and having a different ringtone going off mere seconds later is usually enough to do it. And you can set as many as you want.
Lastly, if you really want to invest in a physical clock (like the one that rolls away), I don’t know much about it, but you might look into the one that gradually lights up so that by the time it goes off, you’re room is rather light. That could be enough to keep you up. In fact, along those same lines, maybe going to bed with your shades/blinds wide open will help. When I do that, it’s dark when I go to bed, but the sun beaming in in the morning is really annoying. The downside is that in the summer it can wake me up/keep me up a bit earlier than I’d prefer.
That’s our solution. She has difficulty waking up to an alarm clock. I set my phone for 5:30. It goes off and I get the coffee going and wake her up with a cup.
We have a California King with room for one more.
The only down side is that I get up at 5:30 every day. I could sleep till 8 if not for her issues with waking.
This manufactured boondoggle could be more simply solved by getting the proper amount of rest so you are not playing tag with the snooze button. Just go to bed earlier so it’s not a Sisyphean task to get up.
Nope, it would just roll under the bed the first time I slept through it. Then I’d never find it again. Although maybe I could use it to terrorize the cats.
Yes, I really am asking for a maker type solution.
Do you know what kind of pressure sensor I should be looking for? A quick google search showed sensors to measure psi, and that seems a bit abstracted from what I’m trying to measure.
Of course, it sounds an alarm when you do get up, not if you fail to get up, but as a pad already designed to detect a person in bed, it’s probably a good starting point.
As asked earlier, why is it so hard to wake up? Fix that first. I found that, once I got sufficient sleep on a schedule, the alarm trained me to wake up. After that I usually woke at the same time every day even without the alarm. Just get more sleep earlier in the evening.
