I built my daughter a custom alarm clock because everything on Amazon sucked

30 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by pneedleman

17 Comments

pneedleman

12 hours ago

My daughter had an iPad and would listen to it at night. Eyes glued to a screen at bedtime drove my wife and me crazy. It would also just keep playing indefinitely unless I remembered to go in and turn it off, along with having to manually manage her Yoto alarm on holidays and school breaks. We wanted her to be more independent and listen to music WITHOUT a tablet in bed.

I ended up building my own because I couldn't find anything on the market without microphones that also had a Spotify controller. This has been going strong in her room for ~1 month now. Features include, alarm sync'd with her school district days off, weather (and alerts), Spotify, Hue, Sleep timer, parent dashboard, and much more.

bdangubic

12 hours ago

fantastic. i would easily pay $150 for a product like this

pneedleman

12 hours ago

wow, means a ton. my daughter has actually been insisting that I sell them and had to get her approval to open-source the code this week.

Code and materials are on my github: https://github.com/pneedleman/reclaim-spotify-clock The off-the-shelf hardware runs around $60.

If enough folks would rather have a pre-assembled plug-and-play kit instead of soldering it themselves, I might seriously look into doing a small-batch run or Kickstarter.

sieve

10 hours ago

Crowdfunding takes the guesswork out of these things, and is a throwback to the old days of patron/subscriber supported ventures. A Kickstarter will let you know exacty how much demand there is for this before you order a single piece of hardware.

Glemmlko

10 hours ago

You are adults, you can control what your kid gets and what not.

No kid needs an iPad.

Man are you kidding me?

pedalpete

7 hours ago

From what I could see in the blog, pneedleman asked AI about the perfect alarm clock, but didn't ask his daughter.

Did the daughter get involved in the design/build process at all?

It seems like a great opportunity to engage the daughter in some way. Better than buying off Amazon, better than just having AI do it.

Maybe I'm wrong or missed it in the blog, but I didn't see any reference to the daughters involvement at all.

pneedleman

6 hours ago

really good feedback. I made it for her for her 12th birthday as a surprise, and I can update the blog to make that more clear.

Since then, I have asked her for feedback and we made some tweaks. She is more excited to market/sell it, than build. I mentioned that at the end of the post and got her permission to open source it. She really wants to try to sell these which I am not as excited about due to being a full time parent & professional.

gamblor956

9 hours ago

There are a dozen clocks that show up on Amazon with all the desired features from the AI-written blogspam post.