A PUT-OFF-YOUR-PHONE LAMP

Brief Idea

Lots of people are addicted to smartphone nowadays. They might go to sleep at 11pm, keep swiping the phone for hours and just cann’t put it down until 2am. The lamp is designed to save them.

My daughter helped me design the lamp:

The User Story

  1. 11pm, the dinasour reminds you it’s time for bed.
  2. You put your phone into the slot, the dianasour stops talking, plays a short piece of soft music to help you fall asleep. The lights in the building turns off slowly.
  3. During the night, if you take your phone out of the slot, the dinasour will scream angrily, and the fan inside its body will blow the ribbon out like a fire. The lights in the building will turn on with red color, just like fire alarm. It won’t be a happy experience, so you will avoid to take your phone out.
  4. In the morning, 6am for example, the alarm clock will wake you up. Your phone is fully charged, and you can take it out of the slot safely.
  5. There is also a rewarding system. If in the night you are doing good, it will remind you to add a piece of jigsaw puzzle to the rewarding wall.

The final design

It would be fun if we put the phone into the dinasour’s mouth. However, if the dinasour has such big a mouth, it would be quite challenge to keep its balance, or the lamp will be too big for bed-table.
Then I changed the design to a alligator.

It uses 3 ATtiny44.

The MCU1 also controls the servo for the mouth and two red-eyes. It get input from MCU3(the clock) to determine whether to open or close the mouth.
There are two springs and an end-stopper under the tongue, so if you put the phone in the mouth, the end-stopper is connected, which will give a high value to MCU1. If it’s sleeping time and the end-stopper is not connected, the alligator’s eyes will turn on and it will also tells MCU3 to play alarm sound.
The force-button on right-front foot can force the mouth to open or close.

The MCU2 is used to control the LED lights on the back, and the lights can be turned on or off by tapping the tail, which has a touch sensor. If I have enough time, I would like to make the triangles on the back removable, so it can be rewarding pieces, which the lights only be turned on when the pieces are connected in the right direction.

The MCU3 is connected to a 4-segment digital display as a clock, and also a speaker. Two buttons on the left legs are used to set the clock.