May 24, 2008 – 3:36 am

Alarm clocks are the nemesis to blissful sleep. Some people require more than what a normal alarm provides to yank them from dreamland.



Nobody likes to be awoken before the body wakes them up, so artificial mechanisms (a.k.a. Alarm Clocks) have been the method of torture to pull our tired bodies out of our warm blanket of unconsciousness.

Creative designs and gadgetry provide these following alarm clocks an advantage against your sleepiness and prevent them from getting blamed for your lateness.

Heres my top 10:

Shocking Alarm Clock: For the masochists out there, this clock will be the perfect method of waking you up. A seemingly normal clock, you turn the alarm off in the conventional way but with the added bonus of a hopefully harmless, shocking electric jolt. Yow.

Link WaterGun Alarm Clock: For the handy people who want to wake up in a splashy mess, this DIY video provides instructions on how you can rig your typical alarm clock to wake you with a squirt from an attached watergun. Wetness or deadly electric shock if not made properly ensues!

Link Bomb Alarm Clock: This Japanese product provides the excitement and stress of bomb diffusers every morning upon wake up. This alarm will sound a recorded voice 3 minutes before your wake time that the bomb will explode. You must diffuse the clock in the correct sequence. If you fail, a loud explosion will sound. Fun!

Link Clocky Alarm Clock: Clocky is the father of all alarmsthatgobeyondsound. Originally a research project at MIT by Gauri Nanda, clocky’s design consists of a furry clock with two wheels. This hardy alarm clock will thrust itself forward and back in a random sequence at your wake time and will hide itself in a new place in your room for you to find to deactivate.

Link Retail Version Here:

Link

Update: Chrome Version! Standup Wakeup Alarm Clock: This elegant design is a alarm clock embedded in a rug. To deactivate the alarm you must stand on the rug. This forces you to get up and off the bed to turn the alarm off. Unfortunately, this is only a proof of concept and not available as a product to purchase.

Link Laser Target Alarm Clock: A likely candidate for gamers, this alarm has a target which you must shoot with a laser gun. The aim and concentration requires you to fully wake up.

Link Kuku Alarm Clock: shaped roughly as a chicken, the alarm triggers the clock to ‘lay’ 5 tiny eggs into a basket. To stop the alarm you have to insert the eggs back into the clock one by one. (When you think about it, thats somewhat weird, to shove the eggs back into a chicken who just laid it)

Link Broken Sfera Alarm Clock: This alarm clock hangs from your ceiling. When the alarm goes off, you reach up and touch the clock to set the snooze which then retracts the alarm clock closer to the ceiling. After a while, you’re going to have to get up to turn the alarm off.

Link Jigsaw Puzzle Alarm Clock: Like that childhood favorite Perfection, the alarm pops out 4 jigsaw pieces from the top and can only be stopped by finding the pieces that scattered around the clock and refit the puzzle. Similar to Puzzle

Link Blowfly Alarm Clock: This alarm has a helicopter like device that takes off from the base. Your job is to catch or find the flying rotors and place it back on the clock base to stop the alarm. If the excitement of the search doesn’t wake you, the cutting blades severing your fingers will.

Link

Honorable Mentions: (a.k.a. all others that I find on the Interwebs)

With creative engineering, there are always solutions to any problem. Its man vs machine, I’m sure each of these devices could be conquered in the name of sleep, but at least provides challenges to our dreaded morning ritual, waking up.

Do you know of any others? What are your creative methods of waking up?

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See Also: Top 20 Wonderfully Unique Flash drives from around the world

Last Updated: 11/15/08