An alarm clock that forces you to play Tetris to prove that you are awake

Alarm clocks are designed to wake people up, but yet there are some of us who despite waking up to the first ring of the alarm, somehow manage to fall back to sleep again, thinking to ourselves “Another 10 minutes and I’ll be up,” which usually turns into an hour, making us late for whatever we were supposed to do.

The fact of the matter is, hitting the snooze button is irresistible, which is probably why Instructables user, nolte919, has designed an alarm clock that will force you to get up and prove to the alarm clock that you are awake before it turns itself off. If that sounded weird, here’s how it works.

When the alarm goes off, hitting the snooze button won’t keep it quiet, in fact hitting the snooze button will actually count towards a user-set limit, and when you reach that limit, you are required to clear four lines of Tetris in order to prove to the alarm clock that you are indeed up and awake.

It’s a pretty novel way to ensure that you are awake and we can’t really complain if we started our mornings with a round of Tetris. If you’re interested in seeing how the alarm clock was built, just head on down to nolte919’s Instructables page for more information and also instructions on how to build one for yourself. Check out the video below to see the alarm clock in action.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gadgets, Gaming
Tags: alarm, arduino, Hacking