Debugging my wife's alarm clock

> I think what this really suggests is that the transformer and power supply are providing multiple voltages. The +9V rail is broken, but the other rail (maybe +5V) for the LED display is fine.

There's a reference design in the LM8560N IC PDF that suggests that the additional secondary winding is only used to drive the display, and all other electronics is powered off the main rail.

The 10V cap is kaput and it can't filter the input power, 9V just acts as a filter (even a discharged one). The OP should replace the cap with a 16V one, because a 10V cap on a 9V rail just isn't right..

I remember this happening in Belgium, where they detected it quite like a month after the fact.

Everybody got a letter in the mail (yes, snail mail!) explaining when they were going to run the system fast for a couple of hours to catch up.

These were very common in the last century and many continue to be used today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telechron

It may not be used so much for clocks now, but you can still buy cheap timed power switches that use this method.

For example: https://www.argos.co.uk/product/5440524

Wall clocks use batteries nowadays, but some clocks in devices permanently connected to mains power still use its frequency - e.g. my Siemens kitchen oven, which promptly was off when there were some synchronization issues in the EU grid a few years ago. You'd think that in an appliance that costs several hundred euros, a quartz crystal wouldn't really move the cost needle, but as long as they can get away with it most of the time, why spend more money?

I've been trying to find one that isn't full of ESP chips or phone chargers for a while, or at least one with a nice flashable chipset. They seem pretty rare these days.

I have used dedicated alarm clocks until the death of my parents, and then I have retired the clocks. One of them was a Sony clock/radio that might have been similar to yours, which I had given to my mother because it had very big digits, so she could see the time clearly from a long distance.

Another alarm clock had been built by my father, some 50 years ago, from medium-scale integration TTL circuits, before the apparition of dedicated integrated circuits for clocks. It still worked perfectly, and because it used a thermo-compensated quartz oscillator it had a much higher accuracy than the cheap quartz clocks or watches that can be bought now.

Since then, whenever I need an alarm or to know the time, I just use a smartphone or computer. I was born much earlier, so I have used dedicated alarm clocks for several decades, but I do not like to use superfluous things, so I no longer use dedicated alarm clocks (or wrist watches or TV sets etc.).

That does not mean that I do not like clocks, either mechanical or electronic. I like them, but I do no longer need them, so I like to examine them like I like to examine some ancient sword, which is beautiful, but for which I do not have any use in my daily life.

I do. I have a Muji one.

I don’t allow anything more complicated than that, a light and a book in the bedroom.

Weirdly Nintendo released an alarm clock this month:

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/nintendo-sound-cl...

Seems a strange thing to do in 2024.

I have since I had to switch to an iPhone for a new job about 9mo ago.

Someone in their design team decided alarms are optional and that sometimes they should just go off silently for reasons.

Utterly stupid feature I didn’t have time to figure out so back to a real alarm clock for waking up on days it’s important to do so.

Whoever decided to make alarms “adaptive” at Apple must have never had a real actual honest job in their life. Utterly infuriating.

You should have 3 copies of your data, on 2 different mediums, at least 1 one in a different location.

I strongly believe that in the same way you should have at least 2 alarm clocks, one of which is of a different type. I strongly believe that you should use your phone and a dedicated alarm clock. Apple has released bugs that caused the alarm clock not to run, or do so at a wrong time. Likewise it is always possible for your normal alarm clock to lose power or run out of battery.

Having both failures on the same day is a lot less likely.

I do! I still use my Ramos clock [0], which unfortunately isn't being made any more.

[0]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2074185253/ramos-alarm-...

Good riddance!

I never had the patentice to fuss with actually setting the alarm using the irritating multiple-mode/single-button controls and extra layer of complexity of multiple alarms, alarms for weekends, and whether you want a pre-selected radio station to play rather than the buzzer. To make it worse, when I did wake up groggy to the alarm I invariably hit the largest button to make it stop-- snooze, only to be further irritated when it would go off again as I was having breakfast.

I do.

My eyesight is so bad that, without my glasses, I cannot see the numbers on my iPhone, even when using the big number display in standby mode. About a decade ago I got a cheap no name thing off of Amazon with a 4” high LED display. That I can see!

Born in 1983. I do, because I don't want my smartphone in the bedroom and I have more trust in a more trivial device. I got a Wake up light by Philips I wouldn't switch for a phone, and a very small Casio pocket clock when I travel. This device is LOUD and I love it ;)

I use a dedicated alarm clock.

Recently, I have built my own: <https://masysma.net/37/dcf77_vfd_raspi_clock.xhtml>

Before that (and now for redundancy, I think my own one still has some minor bugs), I used a cheap one by "OK" <https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/product/_ok-ocr-310-2172968.htm...>.

I don't like that I have to mash some tiny buttons to set the "OK" up and also to stop it. The LED that shows that the alarm is active is also hard to read for me. Hence I tried to improve upon this in my own design. I also found a solution to avoid the backup battery, but it is probably not what the "general public" would like to have either :)

I've got a wake-up light, probably 10 years old by now. It's a dumb machine, no wifi or QI or anything, but it's got a leg up over "old-fashioned" alarm clocks; the clock is red lights and dimmable to "barely visible in daytime", it's a very adjustable light from just enough to not stumble to burning out retinas (and comfortable reading in-between), it's got a radio and builtin "gentle waking up sounds" that are actually pretty horrible because of the tinny speakers. But preferable over morning radio that's usually announcers laughing or terrible music.

Downsides: Very expensive, it stopped working at one point but I replaced the power adapter and it was fine, tinny speakers like I said, and its design is round and on a very narrow base so it'll topple whenever you smack its touch sensitive surface to snooze it.

Before that I had a traditional alarm clock with yellow letters, radio, the works, had that for like 20 years before replacing it. The letters on that were stupidly bright so we stuck an unused photo film in front of it with tape.

I still use one, in part because I don't want to require my phone in my bedroom.

(Sometimes I have it in my bedroom sometimes not, just depends on where I happened to leave it when I go to bed. I do not look at the phone in bed).

I have had this particular alarm clock for literally 35 years. What I prize about it is the ability to set the alarm time with two big dials on front, instead of having to press next-next-next buttons on the bottom.

I do not know what I will do when it finally breaks.

I can't find a picture of it online, I'm not sure if I'm describing it in a way anyone understands, it does not seem to be a well-known alarm clock. It is one (of many) "Sony Dream Machine" models, but most don't have this feature. The front has two big dials side by side. The left one has 24 marked positions, for each of the 24 hours in the day, color-coded for day and night. the other on the right has 12 positions for the 60 minutes in 5 minute increments. So you can just turn one and turn the other to easily set the alarm to whatever time you like (well, whatever time on 5 minute increments!)

My wife uses a Radio Shack alarm clock that looks nearly identical to the one in this post. It broke recently and I fixed it by removing about 3 inches of the power cord where it attaches to the transformer.

I have a handful of Realistic Chronomatic clock radios scattered about the house, including one at my bedside. The LED digits are large, and the alarms are loud - basically, exactly what I want in an alarm clock.

I do. Like many others, it's primarily so that I don't have to bring my phone into my room. I spend way too much time on my glowing pocket rectangle as it is.

It's some Sony radio clock, given to me by a relative 8-10 years ago, likely from Walmart or someplace similar. I have it set to the local classical station which is usually more pleasant to wake up to than the beeper. (Though occasionally, train horns in the distance will sound like trumpets, and I'll wake up and have to determine if it's a literal false alarm or not!)

One strange thing about this clock is, it seems to have a half-implemented support for dimming the display. You can get the display to dim by mashing the snooze bar, but once it's dim there's no going back unless you pull the plug and the backup battery. I saw a thread on a forum once about people discussing this odd behavior, but nobody seemed to have any explanation.

I didn't check the date on mine... but also a Sony Dream Machine. Probably same or similar vintage.

I went out of my way to buy an old Sanyo radio alarm clock so that I don't have to rely on my phone or keep it on my bed side table. The neat flip digit display is a bonus.

One dial to set the time, another to set the alarm.

I do! Bought one at Ikea for 5€.

I use one because the sound on my android refuses to work (I am pretty sure it's a software bug, not a hardware failure, but i have no proof).since otherwise, the phone works correctly, i am not replacing it..

I was born two years after you and I'm always using an alarm clock, which saves me from worrying about my phone before going to bed (I just worry about batteries once a year instead). Though it's a simple beeping model from 15 years ago, I've never tried to use radio as an alarm clock.

I use one, a General Electric clock/radio unit from 1982. I bought it about a year ago so I could use my FM transmitter hooked up to my computer to send audio at specific times. It's just nice to have a dedicated device sometimes.

We just went back to one. For a number of years we let a phone do this job.

Then on one super rough day, both my wife and I were just drained! We hit the bed and were gone, snoozing hard.

Well, neither of us managed to have a phone charged well enough to wake us up and so we just didn't! Kid late for school, late for work, late, late... total pig of a day.

I picked up a $10 clock almost exactly the same as our old one, which did not survive our last move.

Now it has a fresh 9V battery and is set a bit behind the phones. It is the backup.

And we both kind of like having it again. We get a time display at a glance and it does wake us up nicely without being brutal.

These things are simple tech, but useful, low hassle tech too.

> which cap it is

One of my led wall lamp died. I opened the driver/transformer and has a very suspictious capacitor with a curved top.

Anyway, I just bought a $3 driver replacement in front of my home. (I'm bad at soldering, so I'd probably need a whole afternoon to try to fix it).

I'd love an alarm clock that can replicate the sounds of my teenage youth via playing classics such as "Extreme Mario Dubstep - Yoshi Bass Drop (Womp Womp Edition Remix)"

Or if the power goes out. Where I live, there are at least several outages per year.

It is very annoying because a PC motherboard using a coin-cell battery to maintain the clock can often go years without changing the battery (yes I know many of them will eventually leak but it can take decades).

There's also a US-wide time signal on WWV/WWVB - WWVB having a very simple binary-coded decimal time signal at 35 bits per minute.

Alarm clocks could dispense with the battery entirely by using non-volatile storage for the settings and alarms then using the WWVB signal to set the time. Upon resumption of power it could easily configure itself with no user interaction required.

Ironically my old alarm clock from the very early 2000s supported WWVB (with a physical switch for local time zone) but it still used non-volatile RAM for the alarm so upon losing power it would come back, get the correct time within a few minutes, but completely lose all alarms. Infuriating then and now.

The battery keeps the time so it does not reset the time at intermittent power outage

This

Caps dry out but transformers don’t go bad unless dropped or something like that.

The mains frequency is literally how fast the generators in power plants are turning. If the load on the grid increases, those generators slow down slightly and more natural gas/coal/heat needs to be added to increase the frequency again. This whole process is quite complicated as not every plant can react in the same time. Some plants are always at 100% capacity, while others are dedicated to governing the frequency.

So there are small fluctuations, often between 0.2 Hz around the base frequency, but the average is very close to the theoretical 50/60 Hz. And for an alarm clock that is good enough.

You can see a "11/99 T1" sticker on the case, which might indicate a batch date of Nov 1999.

The printing style on the sticker on the case feels later than 1980s too.

I am no expert but from what I read & remember: it can have fluctuations and lagging behind or leading "real" time but it gets corrected and synchronized back later