KILLING TIME

Hack a retro gaming light gun with some tilt switches to control a vintage digital clock radio. After the alarm wakes you up, you can grab the gun and kill it off. Isn’t that what you’ve always dreamed of doing?

Clock radios are everyday hated devices that designers seem to ignore, judging by how little their features and user interfaces have changed. This project adds a new capability, letting would-be sleepyheads enjoy a human-machine interaction of a different sort. Don’t worry, we're not going to connect your clock to an MP3 player and play mellow New Age sounds. We're going to shoot the alarm off. With a gun. Wake-up time is now payback time.

We’ll base the project around a digital clock radio and a light gun for gaming; huge selections of both of these are available inexpensively second-hand, with many beautiful and well-designed examples. To enable our FPSI (First Person Shooter Interface), we’ll outfit the gun with five tilt sensors, arranged at different angles on a small circuit board. A cable tethers the gun to the clock and carries your tilt and trigger signals to the clock’s time and alarm control button contacts.

Set up: p. 103 Make it: p. 104 Use it: p. 109

Roger Ibars lives and works as an Interaction Designer in London. He is interested in how people understand technology and how technology understands people. See more of his work at selfmadeobjects.net.

Make: 101