This is an idiosyncratic alarm clock. It does exactly what I want an alarm clock to do. It is perfect for you if you want an alarm clock to do exactly what it does.
The Gloaming gives you the time, the current temperature from your Netatmo weather station, and a 24 hour forecast from OpenWeather. It uses a deep red colour to avoid blue light and preserve your night vision. Over the hour before your alarm is set, it will raise the blue levels around that to provide a gentle subliminal dawn.
Project this alarm clock on your ceiling at night, with a pico-laser projector like the SONY MP-CL1A or the Nebra Anybeam so that you have no stray light patch. Use a fanless projector and fanless compute stick to keep the room silent at night. Perfect.
The alarm is packaged as a snap to use with Ubuntu's standard kiosk service. It provides the UI as a web service. If you want a completely locked down and autonomous system, use Ubuntu Core on your compute stick. Otherwise, just use classic Ubuntu Server.
sudo snap install thegloaming
Now you need to configure your alarm clock with a file in /var/snap/thegloaming/common/config like this:
port: 8080
netatmo:
client_id: '5e086ebdaffea08bfc4eea85'
client_secret: 'EQ5KMLndLaZrxI7xleSD97FgH7CaqUFJxz'
username: 'xxx@yyy.com'
password: 'XXX'
station_id: '70:ee:50:xx:xx:xx'
ows:
app: '71c92ef0ec07c3c70ff8d5ad9e70ad63'
city: '6942529'
alarm:
hour: 05
minute: 45
The port and alarm are straightforward. You do not have to have an alarm. The netatmo section should include your personal netatmo username and password (the ones you use to log in to netatmo.com to see your weatherstation there). The client_id and client_secret here are for this app, please register your own app if you fork this project. station_id is the mac address of your weather station, you will find it in your netatmo settings.
The ows section is for the OpenWeather Service, which is where the forecast comes from. THe city ID here is for Cape Town, check out OpenWeatherMap for your own city ID at https://openweathermap.org/find (as a clue check the URL of the link to the city name).
If you restart thegloaming snap now, you should see it as up and running:
$ sudo snap restart thegloaming Restarted. $ sudo service snap.thegloaming.alarumd status ● snap.thegloaming.alarumd.service - Service for snap application thegloaming.alarumd Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/snap.thegloaming.alarumd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: active (running) since Fri 2020-01-17 19:39:33 SAST; 2s ago Main PID: 14769 (python3) Tasks: 1 (limit: 4576) CGroup: /system.slice/snap.thegloaming.alarumd.service └─14769 /snap/thegloaming/4/usr/bin/python3 /snap/thegloaming/4/bin/alarumd.py
Jan 17 19:39:33 localhost systemd[1]: Started Service for snap application thegloaming.alarumd.
To make sure that it is working, point your web browser at the machine hosting thegloaming port 8080 and you should see your alarm clock.
Now, install the web kiosk display system:
sudo snap install mir-kiosk
sudo snap install wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk --beta
Now configure the web kiosk to get its web page from thegloaming:
sudo snap set wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk url=http://localhost:8080/
Also, you want to get rid of the mouse pointer from the display:
sudo snap set mir-kiosk cursor=none
If you are projecting onto the ceiling, you might want to invert the display. You can edit /var/snap/mir-kiosk/current/miral-kiosk.display and change orientation from 'normal' to 'inverted' for the relevant display.
And restart the display daemons:
sudo snap restart mir-kiosk
sudo snap restart wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk