Fine woodwork has always been a mystery to me. I blame the church summer camp I went to when I was nine, where the boys got to build wooden doorknockers shaped like woodpeckers, and the girls – you guessed it – got to paint them with flowers. (This also meant that half the children didn’t get to take a doorknocker home with them at the end of the week. Very poorly thought out, Rev H.)

I once made a shelf to go inside an airing cupboard.

Perhaps I assign too much value to things I could never, ever contemplate making myself. But I’ve a suspicion that the rest of you will also think this project is pretty darn amazing: here is Bedbot, created by Peter Roca, the sort of person who can casually say, “The drawer front is a ¾″ thick piece of curly maple that I had laying around”.

Peter calls Bedbot a Daytime Initialisation Assistant. In short, Bedbot is there to ease Peter from sleep into a state of energised morning wakefulness. It is a very over-engineered alarm clock.

Peter did a gorgeous job of constructing the furniture itself. He then designed and built the hardware that lives inside Bedbot, wrote the software (which includes a rather snazzy user interface in QT), put in a touchscreen from Adafruit, and an OLED screen to tell the time with.

Peter says:

It tells time

It can wake me up in the morning

It can play FM radio (f*** AM)

It can play internet audio streams

It can play audio from a headphone jack in the back

Anything else you can think of that requires the internet, speakers, a touchscreen or a radio antenna.

He’s made an online Board Explorer to show you around the hardware (beware: this won’t work on mobile devices) which is well worth your time. There’s also video of Bedbot in action which we can’t embed here, which Peter has made part of his exceptionally thorough build diary and writeup – go and check it out. You’ll find all the software he used on GitHub.

Thanks for the writeup, Peter – we love it. It’s a beautiful object: we hope it continues to cheer up your mornings for a long time to come.