Cure Morning Grogginess with the Zom-B-Gone Lamp

The problems with alarms

Nearly everyone has been awakened by that sharp, piercing sound of an alarm clock blaring in the morning letting you know that it is time to get up and get ready for the day ahead. However, this situation is far from ideal since dealing with the sudden burst of sound and adrenaline can take its toll on one's health over time. To combat this, several people, including the YouTubers from the University of Oslo who go by the channel name Applied Procrastination, have come up with ways to simulate a more natural waking up experience by building artificial sunrise devices. The hypothesis states that before we had alarms, people would naturally wake up slowly whilst the sun was cresting over the horizon, so by building a panel with lights that gradually increase in intensity, a similar effect can be achieved.

Required hardware

The first step of building such a device requires gathering all of the necessary hardware. Most important were the lights, so the team grabbed an old LCD screen from a garbage bin, ripped out the internal backlight, and replaced it with a strip of LEDs. The reflective and diffused nature of the screen's enclosure provides an excellent way to smoothly change the brightness of the lights while still maintaining an even glow all across the panel. The rest of the components were comprised of an Arduino Nano's circuitry and some power management/driver ICs, along with a DS3231 real-time clock (RTC) module for keeping track of the current time.

Building the lamp

With the panel assembled and the components gathered, the Norwegian YouTubers then moved onto the next step of building the lamp itself. To keep things simple, they designed, 3D-printed, sanded, and painted several pieces that fit over the edge of the panel and can be attached more securely with some machine screws. There was also a small brace on the back that allows the whole thing to sit on a window ledge with a small backwards tilt.

The control board

All of the circuitry got mounted onto a custom-designed PCB that contains the deconstructed Arduino Nano, the RTC module, and a ULN2803 transistor array which receives PWM signals from the Nano and amplifies them to a voltage the LEDs can use.

Waking up naturally

In order to control the lighting and set when the device begins to brighten, the team wrote a bit of code that essentially checks the current time repeatedly and then goes into the brightening sequence whenever the target time is reached on the RTC. If the user wishes to simply use the lamp as a lamp, they are able to press a button on the front panel and then turn a rotary encoder to dim or brighten the entire thing. You can see their YouTube video for a quick demonstration and to observe the process of building it.