MAKE: Blog: Weekend Project: Phaser blasted alarm clock! (PDF)

Weekend Project: Phaser blasted alarm clock! (PDF)

Make Pt0493
You saw the video and here's the PDF! Hack a retro gaming light gun with some tilt switches to control a vintage digital clock radio. After the alarm wakes you up, you can grab the gun and kill it off. Isn't that what you've always dreamed of doing?

Clock radios are everyday hated devices that designers seem to ignore, judging by how little their features and user interfaces have changed. This project adds a new capability, letting would-be sleepyheads enjoy a human-machine interaction of a different sort. Don't worry, we're not going to connect your clock to an MP3 player and play mellow New Age sounds. We're going to shoot the alarm off. With a gun. Wake-up time is now payback time.

Make Pt0494
We'll base the project around a digital clock radio and a light gun for gaming; huge selections of both of these are available inexpensively second-hand, with many beautiful and well-designed examples. To enable our FPSI (First Person Shooter Interface), we'll outfit the gun with five tilt sensors, arranged at different angles on a small circuit board. A cable tethers the gun to the clock and carries your tilt and trigger signals to the clock's time and alarm control button contacts. - PDF & Instructable.

Posted by Phillip Torrone | Mar 15, 2008 10:59 AM
DIY Projects, Electronics, Gaming, MAKE Podcast, Weekend Projects | Permalink | Comments (3)

Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: B on March 15, 2008 at 10:16 PM

Is it possible for you to put out the right file quality on your itunes feeds. This is becoming really annoying. I will move on to better content if you continue to do this. NO excuses allowed.

Posted by: pt on March 15, 2008 at 10:22 PM

@B - can you be more specific? what's the "right file quality" ?

Posted by: John on March 16, 2008 at 4:04 PM

What's with the podcasts? Your iTunes feed is delivering your videos in a format that will not load/display on an iPod? At first I thought it was just the older "Best of" videos, but this new video is the same larger size in the iTunes feed.
I know I can subscribe to a different video size. It just seems like your iTunes feed would be geared toward the iPod.

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