This Charming DIY Alarm Clock Starts the Day with Classic MTV Music Videos
Did you ever use a TV’s alarm clock functionality to wake up to classic MTV music video broadcasts? This project recreates that experience.
You’d never know it by watching the channel today, but MTV used to be all about playing music videos. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, it wouldn’t have been unusual for a teen to wake up in the morning and turn on MTV to tune into some tunes while they got ready for school. If that teen had a TV with the function, they could even use MTV like an alarm clock. To recreate that experience in the modern day, Derf Jagged built this charming MTV Alarm Clock.
The idea here was to faithfully recreate that idyllic morning MTV experience, so Derf Jagged took some steps to achieve that. In practice, this might make the device frustrating for younger people. There isn’t any way to select specific videos or even to start a video from the beginning. Instead, it selects a random video from the specified directory and then starts playing that at a random time (up to 80% of the way through the video). The idea is to fill that directory with MTV archive videos, so the experience will be like the TV coming on somewhere in the middle of an MTV broadcast.
Sadly, Derf Jagged doesn’t provide much information about the hardware — just that this is a portable CRT (cathode-ray tube) TV. It appears to be an Emerson TC7 from the mid '80s, but that's all we can discern.
That TV receives its video signal from a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer (the exact model isn’t important). That runs Derf Jagged’s custom Python script, which selects and plays the video using the VLC media player. To make this work like an alarm clock, Derf Jagged leaves the TV’s power switch set to “on.” The TV plugs into a smart outlet set to turn the power on at 9:00 AM and then off at 9:30 AM. A simple cron job tells the Raspberry Pi to run the Python script at the appropriate time.
This is, of course, a very specific alarm clock experience that will only appeal to a small percentage of people. But for those people, Derf Jagged’s project is perfect. From the user perspective, it is almost exactly like waking up to the cheery beats of MTV in its heyday.
