Thank You, totally lost it watching it.
With all this Internet of Things stuff it seems that there’s a chance your house could become hostile to you. Slapping you to wake up. A punch in the face getting a snack from the fridge. A mechanical foot to boot you out of the door. Reminds me of Brazil when his house goes all haywire. (well, as someone mentioned above, Wallis and Grommet)
I’ll ask here because it’s actually related to the thread, and because you and folks like @nixiebunny are smart about these things:
I’ve been looking into making a light that will slowly turn on before my alarm, over the course of ten minutes. It’s an incandescent bulb, so plugged into the mains and I’ll have to use some kind of dimmer.
My initial thought is an Arduino with an RTC, attached to a DIY AC PWM Dimmer (or maybe a triac dimmer?). But is there an easier way to do this without an Arduino?
Sort of off topic but not really - I bought this thing that you are describing. Its a “dawn simulator” and it is AWESOME! It’s a unit I plug a regular lamp into and it has a built in alarm so I can set my “dawn” and over 45mins it goes from dark to light and I walk up naturally.
It is awesome and everyone should have one! I support your endeavour! I am sorry that I know nothing about electronics tho… 
You could always try an unsolvable math problem!
You beat me to it. MrsTobinL does much better when having to get up in the dark hours with one of those. I don’t ever feel awake properly till I have had a shower. Plus I have always been able to sleep with no matter how much light is about. Heck if I didn’t have to work I would probably be going to bed at 4am or so and sleeping till noon.
In this case, an Arduino is a good solution. Making signals change very slowly over time is not easy with non-computerized electronics, especially if you want to do PWM.
I see that commercial “dawn simulator” units cost about $100-200. Seems worthwhile to build your own.
You can get just the timer for $20 or so and hook up your own light rig which is what we have. Ugly but it works.
ETA: we have something like this and that goes to a big full spectrum lamp that hangs from the ceiling for the winter time. We pack it up in the summer.
Velleman has a kit that might still be available.
https://www.quasarelectronics.co.uk/Item/velleman-k8029-slow-on-off-dimmer-kit
I’ve done that, but I was in hospital for it, so I didn’t have to do anything else.
well i get a new one to try monday. metoprolol is off the list as lack of sleep will kill me much faster than high blood pressure.
Now I’m just imagining nurses administering different BP meds, and after each one, they go “BOO!” and record your reaction.
I went in with my blood pressure recorded as 200/120 and at one point I reacted a little too much to one med and it dropped down to 70/40. Fun times that was.
I want an alarm clock that cracks a bullwhip at my face.
I dunno those sting quite a bit. Not that I ummm know from experience or anything…ahh the things I learned at juggling festivals.
It would definitely get you up in the morning though.
And maybe makes your chin bleed a little, so you look like the fuckin’ Marlboro Man, but cooler, getting out of bed?
Yeah, and it exclaims at me, “Get up and work, bitch!”
What is it with medical tests? One of my kids had a weird asthma/allergy reaction from out of the blue, and one of the diagnostic tests was basically to introduce higher and higher concentrations of chemicals designed to mimic an asthma attack. They literally keep going on the test until the person is unable to breath, which in her case was particularly dangerous because she’s a suffer-in-silence type so thankfully I was there to tell the technician “that’s it, stop it NOW” or who knows how long she would have gone before he realized she needed the antidote STAT. She still talks about how scary it was…and she was in high school, not a young child at the time.
Josef Mengele smiled in his grave. I can’t believe some of this diagnostic testing! That is like torture.
