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Comment by cauterized | Hacker News Reader

Just last year I replaced my nearly 20-year-old red LED alarm clock. That thing was built like a tank.

Finding a new one with LEDs in any color other than blue was essentially impossible. Which was especially infuriating because I specifically wanted to avoid adding more sleep-disrupting blue light to my bedroom.

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I recently had to replace my ancient Sony alarm clock. I found one that used an LCD with a backlight that wasn't blue. And of course, it was still too bright.

So I put some window tint on it. I picked up some samples with different transmissivity from the local shop that did my car, and mixed & matched until I got what I wanted, then applied them.

Thankfully there do exist alarm clocks that specifically cater to this problem. Philips had an alarm clock that would light up slowly (using a halogen bulb) and optionally play the radio or (oddly enough) the sounds of cows in an Alpine meadow, or a Buddhist gong, or birds chirping (the radio turned out vastly preferable).

The clock display was backlit by orange LEDs and seemed even less noticeable than the classic red LED display you mention.

Philips still makes those kinds of clocks. The "light up slowly" comes from LEDs, now, and the color of the light ramps up from red, through orange, eventually to white, over the course of a (user-configurable) timespan. They're pretty expensive for an alarm clock. I have one (it was a gift), and I gotta say, it's a way better way to wake up than any cell phone alarm could be. Very gradual and gentle.

The phrase to search for is "Philips wake up light", on Amazon or whatnot. They make a few models, but the prices start around $60.

I bought one last year, and quite hate it, compared to my other (10 years old) alarm. While the waking up by light is nice, the UI is terrible, the clock doesn't even keep the time right, it doesn't have weekend mode (so it woke me twice when I could sleep in). Its almost surprising how much they could mess this up, and its not cheap at $100 for an alarm clock.

I just use my phone for that :)

Ha! This was exactly my experience. I just assumed the problem was that I'd bought it used with no instruction booklet, but wow it was lousy!

ours works great though it's fairly non-intuitive; whenever the time gets messed up my wife asks me to fix it and it always takes me a few tries to figure out what does what again.

Seems to keep time fine, nothing turns on randomly, etc. Not cheap though.

I have Philips Wake-up light and I hate it: radio is terrible, no week scheduling, light volume knob broke after year or so, it can powerup itself with radio in the middle of day or night for no reason, it does not keep time accurately (for such huge price), and so on. But clock display is orange and dim (with 3 level of dimness), so I use it as night clock only — it really good for that.

I had one of those, and eventually replaced it with one of these lamp controllers:

https://www.amazon.com/Lighten-39-95-Uses-Your-Lamp/dp/B00AX...

The time settings were much better than the Philips, which had sort of an awful UX. Also, you can have a longer ramp up, which better approximates a real sunrise.

For the lamp, I used a 3 bulb floor lamp, with Satco halogen lightbulbs (the kind that, for ~70 watts, replace a 100 watt incandescent). It's a higher watt draw, but I'm only running it for an hour or so each morning.

my cats went APESHIT the first time the birds went off.

I chose a Braun clock, since the LCD backlight can be switched off, leaving it nice and dim, and the projection onto the ceiling is can be set to a dim red.

I'm not sure it's a feature, since the apartment is rented and I'll probably need to pay for the repair, but I dropped it on the floor, and it has left a fairly obvious dent.

http://www.braun-clocks.com/clocks/digital/bnc015-rc-digital...

Red, yellow and 2600K white are my ideal colors for night time. Green LEDs make too much light due to human's increased sensitivity to the color and blue has it's own problems.

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