Next in our run-up coverage of MAKE’s 2013 Hardware Innovation Workshop is Craig Bonsignore’s Open Clock Project. Craig is a biomedical engineer with more than fifteen years of experience designing, developing, and analyzing cardiovascular implants. He’s got an MBA from Berkeley, an extensive list of patents and publications, and five years’ service as Director of Medical Design at Fremont-based Nitinol Devices and Components under his belt.
And he’s fed up with badly designed alarm clocks.
“The modern alarm clock,” he writes, “is an object that we use every day, and rely upon when we are most vulnerable. We depend on this thing to know when to go to sleep, and when we have to wake up. It’s the first thing we look at if we awaken in the middle of the night. We interact with this thing in the dark, and usually when we are tired and not quite thinking straight. If it doesn’t work correctly, which happens quite regularly, the day will be off to a stressful start.”
Among Craig’s complaints about off-the-shelf alarm clock offerings: Displays too small to see clearly with uncorrected vision, ambiguous indication of AM vs PM, ambiguous differentiation between multiple alarm times, needlessly complex and fiddly setting procedures, ugly alarm noises, and easily jostled controls.
His prototype Open Clock includes a large, bright, clear LED screen that automatically adjusts its brightness with the time of day, a high contrast red/green color change to distinguish AM and PM, simple intuitive touch-screen controls, and user-definable alarm sounds. It’s Arduino-powered and all resources live online in the project’s Github repository.
Check out the pitch Craig sent us for the Hardware Innovation Workshop’s prototype contest, below:
Click here to register for the MAKE Hardware Innovation Workshop.
6 thoughts on “Pitches with Prototypes: Open Clock Project”
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I love my alram clock, it’s the only clock radio I have found that knows what the day is and doesn’t ring on the weekends.
I hate my alarm clock because the display is impossible to read, it’s a total pain to figure out how to set it, and it automatically adjusts for daylight savings time – using the old standards.
He should consider alternate color settings for red/green colorblindness, or just putting in a huge A or L next to the time.
Hi! . Different color options would be cool. The LED matrix that I’m using is from Sure Electronics, and they only make red+green displays, it seems. In any case, I’ve intentionally designed the clock with redundancy: the AM/PM indicator is always displayed (or an A/P for the little alarm display at the bottom) so the color is extra information that makes the visual experience more intuitive.
Wow I have very similar project: Xronos Clock. Mine doesn’t have touch screen, but has acrade buttons and talks :D xronosclock.com. I’m going to try to submit it to Make, maybe they’ll write about it :)
Hi Len – Xronos is a neat looking clock – I discovered it a few weeks ago, and was happy to find a kindred spirit thinking along the same lines. Congratulations on creating a nifty and elegant design!
It appears the Open Clock Project at bonsignore.com is gone. In fact, the entire bonsignore.com domain appears to be gone, even though the domain is paid-up halfway through 2015.