pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/alarm.jpg" width="494" height="263" style="display:block;" /Mods don't get much simpler and more useful than this: It's an alarm clock that whisks open some window blinds when the alarm goes off, so the sun can tempt you out of bed. There's a microcontroller to handle detecting the alarm signal and to drive a servo wired into the blinds, and some switches to override the alarm and open or close the blinds on command. Check the video of it in action./p pobject width="494" height="413"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/sNZG9Cal1zghl=enfs=1" param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/sNZG9Cal1zghl=enfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="494" height="413"/objectLooks great, but frankly you'd need to wire a giant servo to my feet to drag me out of bed rather than use hack like this, but YMMV. [a href="http://hackaday.com/2008/11/18/alarm-clock-automated-blinds/"Hackaday/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=08e2c90c5d7956fce4a85043a40baa7e" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=08e2c90c5d7956fce4a85043a40baa7e" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=NpuUiXWg"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=67Z1u1Q7"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=3OMXJVyi"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=3OMXJVyi" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=Cg3XUltA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=Cg3XUltA" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/N0qZF1m2ARo" height="1" width="1"/