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MorningTown: A silent alarm clock
=================================
Description
-----------
MorningTown is a silent alarm clock system for a Raspberry Pi Pico W.
At 7:15am, it lights a single green LED. At 8am, it additionally lights a red
LED. Around midday, it turns them both off. It does literally nothing else.
Oh, apart from synchronising the Pico's real-time clock using NTP.
Why???
------
Awareness of the exact time is bad for your sleep. If you're having trouble
getting to sleep, knowing how late it is only increases your stress level,
making it even harder to sleep. Similarly, knowing that your alarm will go off
shortly can prevent you from relaxing in the morning, and grabbing a valuable
few minutes' extra sleep.
All that you really need is an indicator of whether or not it's a sensible time
to get up, or whether you should go back to sleep. That's all that MorningTown
will give you.
In contrast to a clock radio or "artificial sunrise" lamp, there is no danger
of disturbing any other beings who share the room and may run on different
schedules.
Obviously, you should set an audible alarm clock for important wake-up calls.
But, in combination with regular sleep hygiene, two LEDs might be all you need
to synchronise your sleep pattern!
Hardware
--------
You'll need a Raspberry Pi Pico W. Solder red and green LEDs to GPIOs 21 and
22 respectively, each with a 1.5 kOhm series resistor (you won't need much
brightness). There is a ground pad conveniently placed between the two pins.
 
(Hopefully your soldering is a little neater than mine).
Optionally solder a small button between GPIO 16 and GND. This will be a test
button for checking the device is working properly (not illustrated above).
You can use other GPIOs if you prefer - just change the definitions of
`LED_RED`, `LED_GREEN` and `TEST_BUTTON` in `morningtown.c`. The positions of
16, 21 and 22 just happen to work well for the geometry of my own nightstand.
Software
--------
Edit `compile` to set the path to the [Pico SDK](https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk),
as well as your WLAN name and password.
Set your offset from UTC in `ntp_client.h`, e.g. if you live in time zone UTC+1:
```
#define UTC_OFFSET_SEC 3600
```
Sorry, there's no automatic handling of daylight savings yet.
To set different wake-up times, edit routine `check_clock()` in
`morningtown.c`.
Run `compile`, then copy `build/morningtown.uf2` to the Pico.
Operation
---------
Connect the Pico to any USB power supply. All three LEDs (red, green and the
one on Pi board itself) will light briefly. The device will then attempt to
connect to the WLAN and synchronise its clock. During this phase, the red LED
will be lit continuously and the board LED will light as long as the WLAN is
connected. Once an NTP reply is received, all the LEDs will go dark until
morning.
When the (optional) test button is pressed (and held), the board LED will
indicate a current WLAN connection, the green LED will indicate that NTP is
synchronised, and the red LED (hopefully not lit) indicates some kind of error
condition.
Licence
-------
MorningTown is based on a heavily modified version of one of the Pico SDK
examples (picow-ntp-client), copyright (c) 2022 Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd.,
under the BSD 3-clause licence.
MorningTown is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.
MorningTown is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
MorningTown. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
About the name
--------------
It's like a railway signal for your sleep:
> Somewhere there is sunshine
> Somewhere there is day
> Somewhere there is Morning town
> Many miles away
- [The Seekers, 1966](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsqNcZ1JqW8)
|
