A PUT-OFF-YOUR-PHONE LAMP

Brief Idea

This is a lamp which can:
1. remind you to go to bed
2. require you to put your phone into a slot when you go to bed
3. alarm when you take up the phone in the night
4. wake you up in the morning
5. charge the phone’s battery during the night

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 lamp looks like a stage. In the daytime there is a sun, and in the night a motor will change the scene by a moon.
There are two buildings and between them is the slot for smartphone.

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.

Technical Consideration

The technical detail is not decided yet. I might use a lever as the switch, but a spring might also work.
I had thought of making a Rube Goldberg Machine, which changes the switches’s positions, hence there will be different effects when taking off the phone in midnight or in the morning. But machine might be too complex, so I might use programming for this feature.

Project Plan

I checked the schedule, and categorized them into 3 categories:

  • Yellow: software related
  • Green: hardware/electronics related
  • Blue: outlook and mechanical related

I’m good at the yellow part. The 2019-nCord disease might cause us unable to go to lab and practice the blue part. So I will start from the green part.

There are three key questions about the green part:
1. how to create my own board to control light/fan/motor/buzzer rather than using a *-ino board?
2. how to make a electronic timer?
3. how to make a phone battery charger, which can tell if it is charging or not? (The charger should be very stable as I don’t want to ruin my phone).

After figure out these questions, I will do the detail outlook and mechanical design.

The timeline will be:

  • Green part: by end of March.
  • Blue part: by mid of May.
  • Yellow part: by early of June.