A great clock project from tycen for those of you RPi users with kids:
Here’s the problem: a) young kids don’t instinctively know how to tell time and b) young kids think that at the moment they wake up in the morning it must be, at that moment, time to be awake for the day. Even if it’s 5am and Mom and Dad want to sleep in until 7am.
Ideally the solution would be to teach kids how to tell time and do math so they can understand that at 5am they still have two hours to sleep. Not to mention teaching them self discipline. But, failing that, we typically resort to putting the kid back to bed and hope they don’t wake up again for 2 hours. The more young kids you have (and I have a few) the more this solution doesn’t scale.
So, there’s a few products available to help with this. We’ve deployed one in our house that works pretty well. It’s an “alarm” clock, but instead of a buzzer going off at the wake up time, the light goes from red to green (the yellow light is just a night light). So all we have to teach the kids is that (wrapped it in a rhyme): When the light is red, stay in bed!
This product is about $35 on Amazon (and there are other options for around the same price – search for kid’s wake up light). If you’re like me, when you hear that anything is $35 you immediately associate that with the cost of a Raspberry Pi and wonder if you could replace said item with a Raspi instead.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro”? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.
We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!