This Awesome Mod Replaces the Awful Sound of a Vintage Flip-Style Alarm Clock with Something…

Here at Hackster, it’s not much of a secret that I tend to glorify retro tech of all kinds. Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe it’s my mechanical design roots that make me favor good ol’ fashioned analog devices over sleek new-fangled touch screen things — whatever it is, I just love them. But, as Nina Pavlich points out in her fantastic tutorial, some parts of vintage tech are better left to the past.

Pavlich had a very cool mechanical flip alarm clock, which she put on her nightstand in order to avoid the late-night smartphone browsing that many succumb to. But, while it was very aesthetically pleasing, the clock had a abhorrently obnoxious alarm sound that made it virtually impossible to use for a woman who valued a pleasant wake-up call. So, she set out to do whatever any good hacker would do: bend the technology to her will.

That meant replacing the normal alarm sound with something more bearable, which she did using an Adafruit Feather and an MP3 FeatherWing. The first step was to track down and tap the normal alarm trigger, which was mechanical in Pavlich’s case. Then it was a simple matter of disabling the normal alarm, and monitoring that trigger with the Feather. Once it senses the trigger, it tells the MP3 FeatherWing to play something nice — and voila! The perfect combination of retro distraction-free aesthetics and modern only-semi-jarring alarm sounds!