I built my daughter a custom alarm clock because everything on Amazon sucked

I built my daughter a custom alarm clock because everything on Amazon sucked reclaimtheday.substack.com

How a $12 chip, Spotify, Philips Hue, and our school district’s calendar brought peace to our mornings.

40 points•pneedleman•4 days ago•21 comments•

#custom #amazon #everything #daughter #clock #alarm #sucked #custom alarm

21 comments

My daughter had an iPad and would listen to it at night. Eyes glued to a screen at bedtime drove my wife and me crazy. It would also just keep playing indefinitely unless I remembered to go in and turn it off, along with having to manually manage her Yoto alarm on holidays and school breaks. We wanted her to be more independent and listen to music WITHOUT a tablet in bed.

I ended up building my own because I couldn't find anything on the market without microphones that also had a Spotify controller. This has been going strong in her room for ~1 month now. Features include, alarm sync'd with her school district days off, weather (and alerts), Spotify, Hue, Sleep timer, parent dashboard, and much more.

raylad4 days ago

Looks cool but you may want to rethink the blue LED for an alarm clock, because blue light interferes with sleep.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthy-aging-and-longevity/b...

pneedleman4 days ago

100% - the screen automatically turns off at night based on Sunset time, and turns back on at sunrise (unless alarm goes off before).

You can also get a classic green or color display with negative display and use custom backlight colors (https://www.adafruit.com/product/399)

bdangubic4 days ago

fantastic. i would easily pay $150 for a product like this

pneedleman4 days ago

wow, means a ton. my daughter has actually been insisting that I sell them and had to get her approval to open-source the code this week.

Code and materials are on my github: https://github.com/pneedleman/reclaim-spotify-clock The off-the-shelf hardware runs around $60.

If enough folks would rather have a pre-assembled plug-and-play kit instead of soldering it themselves, I might seriously look into doing a small-batch run or Kickstarter.

Glemmlko4 days ago

You are adults, you can control what your kid gets and what not.

No kid needs an iPad.

Man are you kidding me?

elevation3 days ago

This advice is underrated for young children, but less helpful during the transition into the teen years, where it’s more important to teach a young adult how to keep healthy practical boundaries for themselves rather than tightly control their home environment (where they’ll spend less and less time as they develop.)

pedalpete4 days ago

From what I could see in the blog, pneedleman asked AI about the perfect alarm clock, but didn't ask his daughter.

Did the daughter get involved in the design/build process at all?

It seems like a great opportunity to engage the daughter in some way. Better than buying off Amazon, better than just having AI do it.

Maybe I'm wrong or missed it in the blog, but I didn't see any reference to the daughters involvement at all.

pneedleman4 days ago

really good feedback. I made it for her for her 12th birthday as a surprise, and I can update the blog to make that more clear.

Since then, I have asked her for feedback and we made some tweaks. She is more excited to market/sell it, than build. I mentioned that at the end of the post and got her permission to open source it. She really wants to try to sell these which I am not as excited about due to being a full time parent & professional.

pneedleman1 day ago

Appreciate the feedback. I made updates so the birthday story is more clear.

asknkrkt2 days ago

What board did you end up using, and did the parts come from AliExpress? Curious how much this year's tariff changes added to a one-off build like this.

pneedleman1 day ago

Adafruit and ~$60

The parts are all linked on the site and the GitHub.

gamblor9564 days ago

There are a dozen clocks that show up on Amazon with all the desired features from the AI-written blogspam post.

pneedleman4 days ago

I'd love to see them :)

gabrielsroka4 days ago

Obligatory, related from Ben Eater https://youtu.be/3XDH-fZKnQk

"Let's build a digital clock", part 1, Aug 2026

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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