Robine Wake

Wake up to light, not to a siren.

A privacy-first smart alarm clock built on a Raspberry Pi. A slow sunrise, a gentle sound, guided breathing — all running on your own device, with no cloud and no camera.

Try the live demoRead the docs

Designed around a calm morning

Every behaviour is specified, tested against a hardware simulator, and degrades safely.

A dawn, not a siren

A 60-LED strip raises a sunrise over the pre-wake ramp so full daylight arrives exactly at alarm time. Sound follows in two gentle stages.

Guided breathing

Pick a cadence and a duration: the strip breathes while the speaker plays a procedural ambience. The clock keeps the rhythm, even with your phone locked.

Your music, no app

AirPlay and Bluetooth (A2DP) receivers turn the speaker into a bedside player. An alarm always takes priority.

Evening light

A warm reading light, then a sunset of up to two hours, with no blue in the evening programs. Rain and storm ambience fade out with the light.

Offline and fail-safe

Time, alarms and sessions live on the device. If the light, the network or the app fails, the audible alarm still rings.

Private by design

No camera, no presence detection, no cloud account. Data stays on the clock, telemetry is bounded to seven days, updates are signed.

Planned

Bed vibration

A DIY tactile channel coupled to the bed frame for breathing, music and progressive waking. Specified; not built yet.

How it works

One small computer, one amplifier, one light strip.

  1. Set it from your phoneThe iOS / Android app or the local web page. Alarms, time zones and DST rules are validated on the device.
  2. The Pi keeps the timeA Nerves firmware on a Raspberry Pi owns the schedule and the wake-session state machine, and restarts deterministically after a power cut.
  3. Light and sound rise togetherThe Pi drives an I2S amplifier and commands an ESP32 over UART that renders the sunrise frame by frame.
  4. You decide when it stopsSnooze or dismiss with explicit controls or the physical bedside button. Nothing watches you sleep.

Runs on hardware you can buy

The same application runs on a computer for development, with the hardware simulated.

TargetBoardAudio
rpi3Raspberry Pi 3 B / B+HiFiBerry Amp2
rpi0Raspberry Pi Zero WInnoMaker MA12070P HAT
hostAny computerSimulated, with a hardware lab

Light: WS2812B strip on an ESP32. Remote: optional LoRa bedside button. Firmware: Nerves (Elixir/OTP), A/B slots, signed over-the-air updates.

Open, documented, testable

The specifications are the source of truth and each requirement is traced to a test. Read them, run the simulator, or build your own.

Technical documentationSystem architectureSource on GitHub