So I've found I wake up pretty easily when I'm camping, but not easily at all in my room at home. I think this is because when I'm camping, the tent sides just let sunlight through, but at home my room is pretty much a cave (one tiny window facing away from the rising sun). Does anyone know if there is an app anywhere that will wake you with the LED flash on an Android phone? Or a Lumia phone, I have a Lumia 900 sitting around doing nothing.
If such an app doesn't exist, how hard would it be to make one? I think it'd be a nice thing to have.
Something like that should do. Comes on at a preset time and goes off at a preset time or you can just turn it off with the switch and it becomes a normal outlet. They will usually allow you to set to the nearest hour. Some fancier ones will go to half hour marks. More expensive digital ones let you set any time you want.
Philips I believe all ready made one. It has sound and an every increasing light so it starts off dim and builds up to full brightness and also plays nature sounds, you might be able to change the sounds no idea.
But nuts to that grab a pi, a pi lite and get working on making your own. Much more fun.
When you get into a pattern and its stable you wale up on time easy. I had a job that was 6am start and after a few months I was awake and thinking time for the alarm to go off so many times it did very shortly after. It got to the point I woke up and layed in the warm bed just for the alarm to go off when I could of just got up/
Using light is interesting. As deejeta said it would be easy to test with a timer and a lamp. If it works then is might be a boon for couples in bed together when only one needs to wake. I see laser beams waking people all over the earth !
Get a real light alarm that turns the light on gradually instead of just suddenly blinding you. They should be pretty cheap nowadays.
A word of warning about the cheap Philips ones though, they're powered from a wall socket and don't have any batteries (even for keeping time), so if there's a 3 second long power outage during the night, it won't be waking you up. Unless you plug it in a UPS.