Wake-Up Light : Wake-up easily and well rested

Another weekend project that I’ve been working on is Wake-up light. Lately I’ve been doing more research on sleep phases and how to “hack” your brain to wake-up more refreshed and adjust your sleep cycle. There are many studies out there explaining this and providing scientific evidence, so if this is something you are interested in, I encourage you to go and get more detailed information on this subject. However I won’t go into too much detail, I’ll just try to give very simple explanation: When you sleep, you are either in REM or deep sleep (NREM) phase. When you wake up in REM phase you feel fresh, relaxed and full of energy. When you are woken up during the deep sleep phase, you feel like you’ve just been hit by a bus, and you take long time to actually wake up... Read more

Project Goal

Create a Wake-up Light that will serve as a visual alarm clock. As mentioned in the article above, it is much better and has many health benefits to be woken up gently by light than to be rudely woken up by an alarm clock.

The article contains all information that you need to build this project and also provide information on how this circuit works so you can take it step further and tailor it to your needs, as it is the ultimate goal of this project to provide knowledge and incentive to make something for yourself.

Project components

• Microcontroller: PIC12F1822
• RTC: DS1307
• LDO: LM1117MPX-5.0

Repository Contents

• Schematic is "preliminary" capture of the working prototype that I have made for my personal use. It has been tested and proven to work. Also, depending on your use case, there might be room for even more improvements
• Firmware supplied is the one that I developed for the early stage of the prototype and ended up using it till the end since it is working and doing the job nicely. However, there is some room for improvement and polishing.
• Future content - If there is need and enough interest for this, I will update my code to contain more comments (although it's pretty simple firmware and really self explanatory) and also design a PCB layout and provide you with source file and Gerber files, so everything is ready in case if someone want's to order components and order PCB.