In this grand collaboration between Andrew Bueno, Erica Lazrus and Caroline Record we created a prototype for a sifteo alarm clock. In case you have never stumbled upon these new fangled little cubes before, Sifteos are the new kid on the block for tangible computing. Sifteos are not a single device, but rather a collection of cubes that are aware of their orientation to one another. Our idea was to create an alarm clock that would only stop ringing when all the cubes were gathered together in a certain orientation. The user could set the level of difficulty by hiding the cubes about their abode for their future sleepy self to collect in the wee hours of the morning. We used two cubes: one as the hours and one as the minutes. Each could be set by tilting the cubes upward or downward. We have lots of ideas of how we could improve on our initial prototype. For example we would like to use png fonts , include more cube, and represent time more accurately.

code on github: https://github.com/crecord/SifteoAlarmClock 

Erica: Erica was MVP, and bless her soul for it. She certainly
did the most coding and managed to figure out the essentials of how
exactly we could get this alarm to work, and she tirelessly built off Bueno’s timing mechanism to figure out how to represent  time without the Sifteo using too much memory every time it checked how many minutes and seconds were left on the clock.

Caroline: Caroline was our motion-mistress, and implemented our
system for setting the alarm based on the movement of the Sifteo. She also
came up with the original idea, and so deserves a ton of credit in that
respect. Caroline also impeded the process by bothering Erica and Bueno to explain the workings of c++.

Bueno: During our short brainstorming process, Bueno
suggested that, if the alarm were to have different difficulty settings,
that we consider solving anagrams as a possible challenge for the user.
When we actually got down into the coding, it was often Bueno’s job to sift
through the documentation/developer forums in order to figure out answers
to some of our confusion concerning how exactly we should go about coding
the darn things. In the end, Bueno figured out how exactly we could go about
ensuring the Sifteo could keep track of time.

Sifteo Alarm Clock from Caroline Record on Vimeo.