This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady
Sloth Clock: the alarm clock that rewards you for sleeping badly. 🦥
Every alarm clock on Earth punishes laziness. It rings at the same minute whether you slept like a log or stared at the ceiling until 3 a.m. Then it gives you a snooze button, so you can chop the last half hour into nine-minute pieces of broken, useless sleep.
Sloth Clock flips that. It watches how you actually slept, and if the night was rough, it lets you stay in bed longer, up to 30 extra minutes, decided once and up front. Then it wakes you the way a sloth would want to be woken: slowly. A ten-minute sunrise creeps across the LED matrix, a soft chime follows, and Gemma 3 1B, running on the clock itself, greets you as a sleepy, kind sloth and tells you why you got the lie-in.
06:45. Good morning, dear. Your sleep was a bit restless, so I've given you a longer rest.
That is a real message, written by the model on the board.
It is a small physical AI agent: it senses (radar), decides (night score + hard-coded health rules), and acts (light, sound, words), all on one board, offline.
Sleeping in is the easiest feature in the world to get wrong, so the sloth has rules it cannot break:
These limits are hard-coded in one small file, not settings. Future-sleepy-me does not get a vote.
Because of the "not two days in a row" rule, the most the sloth can give in a normal week is 4 lie-ins × 30 min = 2 hours of extra sleep, calculated straight from the rules. It never gives you a late morning.
The theme isn't just the name. Every part of the clock is deliberately slow:
| Part | How it is slow and steady |
|---|---|
| 🌅 Wake-up | A 10-minute sunrise over 8 brightness steps instead of a blaring beep |
| 🧠 The model | Gemma writes one sentence a day ,45 minutes before you wake , at a calm ~4.4 tokens/s. It has all the time in the world. |
| 📟 The card | A no-glow e-paper card that refreshes only when something changes, and uses no power to keep showing it |
| 🪜 Your to-do list | One tiny step on a job you keep postponing, sized by how well you slept. Bad night? The step gets smaller. |
Sloth Clock on the nightstand: UNO Q with the LED-matrix sunrise, the radar facing the bed, and the e-paper card.
Live page served by the UNO Q: breathing, heart rate and movement graphs, plus the night score with every term shown.
The last decision: the final alarm, the rules that fired, the full decision record and Gemma's message.
You shouldn't have to sleep eight hours to see an alarm clock work (that would be a little too on-theme). Demo mode lets you lie down for a few minutes. When the nap ends, the clock scores it, makes its decision, and wakes you right away with a one-minute sunrise. Demo data goes into a separate database, so it never mixes with your real nights.
A bedside sloth that wakes you gently and moves the jobs you keep putting off forward, one tiny step a day.
Everything runs offline on an Arduino UNO Q.
Work in progress. Measured results…
| Path | What lives there |
|---|---|
app/sketch/sketch.ino |
STM32 real-time side: radar line parsing, 10 s rows, LED-matrix sunrise, chime, button |
app/python/ |
Linux side: SQLite, night score, alarm decision, Gemma wake message, validator, web API |
app/assets/ |
The web page (plain HTML, CSS and JS, hand-drawn canvas charts, no frameworks) |
firmware/radar_forwarder/ |
Tiny sketch on the radar kit's XIAO ESP32C6 |
firmware/epaper_card/ |
The e-paper card firmware |
tests/ |
Decision, validator and night-score tests, plus the on-board Gemma message test |
MIT licensed.
| Component | Role |
|---|---|
| Arduino UNO Q (4 GB) | The whole brain: STM32U585 MCU + Qualcomm QRB2210 Linux on one board |
| Seeed MR60BHA2 60 GHz mmWave kit (XIAO ESP32C6 inside) | Breathing, heart rate, presence and movement, contact-free |
| XIAO ePaper Display Board EE04 + 7.5" 800×480 mono panel | The no-glow bedside card, with 3 buttons |
| INMP441 I2S microphone | Rain detection from sound features only, never recorded audio |
| PAM8403 amplifier + small speaker | The soft chime |
| Push button | Dismiss the alarm |
Everything that goes into a Sloth Clock. All of it runs on USB power: low voltage, no mains, nothing that heats up or moves.
KiCad schematic: radar UART into the UNO Q, the INMP441 on the STM32's SAI pins (SCK = PB10, WS = D10, SD = A4), the PAM8403 on a PWM pin, and the dismiss button.
llama-server`` web_ui brick.
An alarm clock is a strange mix of jobs. Part of it must be hard real time (the alarm must ring, the button must work). Part of it is heavy and slow (a language model). Most boards make you pick one. The UNO Q is two computers on one board, and Sloth Clock uses both for what each does best:
| ⚡ STM32U585 (Zephyr, real time) | 🐧 Qualcomm QRB2210 (Debian Linux) | |
|---|---|---|
| Sense | Read the radar stream, validate every line, summarise 10 s rows | Store the rows in SQLite |
| Think | Compute the night score, decide the alarm with hard limits, run Gemma 3 1B locally | |
| Act | Drive the built-in 13×8 LED matrix sunrise, play the chime, read the button | Validate every message, serve the web page |
They talk over the Arduino Bridge (MessagePack RPC), and every message stays tiny: one summary row of 8 integers every 10 seconds, well under the Bridge's 256-byte limit. Over an 8-hour night that is 2,880 rows, which is small enough to keep months of nights on the board.
The split is what makes it a trustworthy alarm clock:
MR60BHA2 radar ──UART──▶ XIAO ESP32C6 ──CSV, 1/s──▶ STM32 (validate, 10 s rows)
│ Bridge
▼
Linux: SQLite ▶ night score ▶ decision (hard limits) ▶ Gemma 3 1B ▶ validator
│ Bridge
▼
STM32: LED-matrix sunrise ▶ chime ▶ button
Every minute is checked for movement, presence and breathing regularity, then:
score = 100 − (restless % + 0.5 × irregular-breathing % + 10 × long awakenings)
Each term is a share of the minutes observed, so a 15-minute demo nap and a full night use the same scale. The web page shows every term, so you can see exactly why you got (or didn't get) your lie-in.
This was the most interesting part. A 1B model is lovely at sounding warm and terrible at facts. An alarm clock that lies about what time it is is worse than no alarm clock. So:
6:45 is one time, not 6 and 45, and a range like 2:10–3:30 is never read as a minus sign)
The first version asked the model to include the time itself. It often didn't. And on two test nights where the alarm had not moved at all, it cheerfully announced "I've given you a little extra time". 😅 Each failure became a validator rule and a test.
Here are the results on the board, across 10 different decision records (good night, restless, rain, shifted yesterday, not enough data, and so on):
| Prompt version | ✅ Valid on first try | 🔁 Valid after retry | 📄 Fell back to template |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model writes the time itself | 4 / 10 | 1 / 10 | 5 / 10 |
| Code writes the time, model writes the reason | 8 / 10 | 2 / 10 | 0 / 10 |
That took the share of messages written by the model from 50% to 100%, with zero wrong numbers getting through.
More real messages from that run:
07:00. Good morning, dear. The rain is a bit gloomy, so I've given you a longer rest.
06:30. Good morning, dear. I've been waiting for you.
| Measured on the UNO Q | Result |
|---|---|
| Generation speed (Gemma 3 1B, 3 threads) | ~4.4 tokens/s |
| Prompt processing | 6.5–7.4 tokens/s |
| First token, cold prompt | 2.4 s |
| Time per wake message | 20–38 s |
| Time budget before the alarm | 45 min , soover 70× headroom over the slowest message |
It is not perfect, and I'd rather say so. In one retry the model turned "you slept badly, but you already slept in yesterday" into "you've already had a restful sleep". Every number was right, but the tone was wrong. A rule-based validator can check facts; it can't fully check feelings. That's next on my list.
lines=12, bad=1, so the bad line was caught and counted, not crashed on docs/measurements.md
I used Claude Code as my coding assistant to write the software. Everything else was mine: the idea, choosing and wiring the hardware, the health rules, flashing and testing on the board, and every measurement in this post.
Because this device lives in your bedroom, watching you sleep. 🛏️
A closed model could write a slightly nicer sentence. It could not do it on a nightstand, offline, for free, without learning when you sleep.
😴 Up to 30 minutes more sleep on exactly the mornings you need it, and up to 2 hours a week, with zero risk of being late. The hard limit always wins.
🧠 Zero decisions before coffee. You never again bargain with a snooze button, half asleep, about whether you "can afford" five more minutes. The sloth already did the maths against your hard limit.
⌚ Zero effort to track sleep. No wearable to charge, no app to open, no button to press at bedtime. You just go to bed. The laziest possible sleep tracker is one you don't have to touch.
🪜 Progress without willpower. Tomorrow's card asks for one tiny step, never the whole job, and a smaller one after a bad night. Slow and steady.