A sunrise alarm clock using the the Adafruit NeoPixel FeatherWing and a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

Dawn simulation

Dawn simulation is a technique that involves timing lights, often called wake
up lights, sunrise alarm clock or natural light alarm clocks, in the bedroom to
come on gradually, over a period of 30 minutes to 2 hours, before awakening to
simulate dawn.

Follow this guide from Adafruit to install the libraries needed to use the board and neopixel libraries on the Raspberry Pi.

Connect GPIO 18 on the Pi Zero to the data pin on the FeatherWing.

Set the times to wake in the configuration.json. You can set one time for each day of the week using 24 hour time in hour and minute pairs, for example 0630 as [6, 0].

The alarm will start by lighting 2 LEDs and after a delay lighting more until all of the LEDs are lit. You can set the color and the delay in the configuration file.

{
 "week": {
      "monday": [6, 0],
      "tuesday": [6, 0],
      "wednesday": [6, 0],
      "thursday": [6, 0],
      "friday": [6, 0],
      "saturday": [6, 30],
      "sunday": [6, 30]
   },
   "color": [51, 153, 255],
   "delay": 60
}

You can create a Systemd service so that the alarm runs on startup by creating a service in /etc/systemd/service/sunr.service with the following information:

[Unit]
Description=Sunrise alarm clock.

[Service]
Type=simple
User=root
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/sunr
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python /home/pi/sunr/sunr/sunrise.py
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Tom Camp

• 0.1 - Initial release

• GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.
• SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later