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80 lines
6.7 KiB
Plaintext
80 lines
6.7 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 2924
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Title: HPR2924: Hacking an Alarm Clock to Make it Quieter
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2924/hpr2924.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-24 13:20:05
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---
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It's the 17th of October 2019 and this is HBR episode 2924 entitled Hacking in a Larm
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Clock to Make It quieter. It's hosted by John Colp and it's about six minutes long carrying
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a clean flag. Some areas. I talk about installing a resistor in the speaker wire of an alarm
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clock so it won't be so loud. Enjoy!
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This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
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Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
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Hey everybody this is John Colp and left here at Louisiana and this probably be a pretty quick
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episode today. What I wanted to talk about was a recent hack I did on a small device in my house.
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It is a little just alarm clock a little digital alarm clock by Sharp. It's something I picked up
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at the thrift store for a couple of bucks probably for I don't even remember why because I had a
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clock radio at the time but somebody in the house must have needed a little alarm clock and so
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I picked it up and it does not have a radio or anything it just does one thing it tells the time
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and then it will do an alarm also and it's the alarm that brings me to where we are today making
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an episode about this. I normally use an alarm on my phone to wake up in the morning if I need any
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alarm at all. I usually will wake up before the alarm goes off anyway but you know I like retro
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things and old school stuff and so one day this last week I decided you know what I'm going to
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just set the alarm on this little bedside alarm clock because I got rid of my clock radio because
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I didn't like it was there was something going wrong with it like the the outside casing was
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getting all sticky and I didn't want to it's just I got rid of it and then so now all I've got
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next to the bed is this little clock with no radio but I decided one day last week to set the alarm
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on the clock and go old school and just have an alarm clock wake me up well next morning when the
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alarm went off it was so loud that I sat straight up in bed with my heart pounding and it really
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scared me and it scared my wife and you know it was not a good thing and so I started thinking what
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I could do possibly to make it quieter and I started googling online about how to
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make the alarm clock quieter and I came across an article or a little blog post or something that
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that someone had written about making one of your children's toys quieter by simply inserting a
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resistor in one of the speaker wires and I thought well that sounds easy enough I'm going to try
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that with this alarm clock as well but I didn't really know what the alarm clock had inside it whether
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it had a speaker or a buzzer or what so I opened the thing up and found that I've got some pictures
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that I will make a flicker album right now I'm looking at them on my tablet but inside the alarm
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clock it's very small there's a little transformer for the power to get it down to the right
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voltage and then there's a small circuit board there's a little LED read out I guess for the numbers
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and then in the bottom of the case there's a round thing with two wires soldered directly to it it
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looks like it's a buzzer I don't think it's an actual speaker but I guess it could be I can't see
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the underside of it but anyway it's the thing that makes the noise and so it was right there
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and it seemed very easy to be able to just cut one of those wires and stick a resistor in there so
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I did that and it didn't make a noticeable difference I the first resistor I used I think was
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not nearly enough resistance and I'm very sorry that I did not record the sound of the alarm
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clock before and after because that would have made a better impression as to you know what a
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difference the resistors make but anyway the first resistor I tried did not make a substantial
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difference it did not noticeable at all to me I think I went with something like a 256 ohm or two
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whatever something in that range and so I decided to cut the other speaker wire to put another
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resistor in that one rather than undoing the one I had already done because I had already done the
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heat shrink on the wires and everything so anyway before I soldered in the other resistor I started
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testing it by I made the alarm clock go off and just left it go left the alarm going and then
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just one by one I tried one resistor after another in increasing strength and you know put the
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connectors put the put the I guess the the leads or connections together to listen to the sound
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and I finally found one that sounded like it reduced the sound enough where it wouldn't scare
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me to death in the morning but also it would wake me up and it was the 12k ohms so 12 like
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it's 12,000 ohms 12k ohm resistor soldered into place there made the alarm clock where it was
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tolerable but also would still wake me up so I'm pretty happy with it I'm the the wife is still not
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crazy about the sound of it I think she likes the sound of the phone going off better but it was
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a pretty fun little hack it didn't take all that long and you know it's always satisfying when
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you can modify one of the items in your house to make it work more like you wanted to and so I
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certainly encourage anybody who's got an alarm clock that's too loud that they would like to use
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and have some resistors lying around I mean I have a I bought on Amazon a kit of resistors I think
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it's got I don't know 1200 different resistors in it of all levels of resistance so you know
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anytime I need a resistor I can just dig around in there and find one it may be cost ten dollars
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to get the kit of 1200 resistors and so it's it's easy enough to keep these kinds of things around
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if you're interested in doing these sorts of projects anyway so if you're interested take a look
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on my flicker photo album you can see the pictures of the inside of the thing and then what it
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looks like after it's done well it's just a closed up alarm clock flashing the number 12 but um
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that's it that that's all I got today this is not a long episode at all I will uh talk to you guys
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next time okay bye
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you've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio. We are a community podcast
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network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday today's show like all our shows
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was contributed by an hbr listener like yourself if you ever thought of recording a podcast
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then click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public Radio was found
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by the digital dog pound and the infonomicon computer club and it's part of the binary revolution
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at binrev.com if you have comments on today's show please email the host directly leave a comment
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on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself unless otherwise status today's show is
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released on the creative comments attribution share a light 3.0 license
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