Alarm System with Snooze Feature

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The one sound most people dread in the mornings is the beep of the Alarm Clock. However, when you code an Alarm Clock by yourself that reminds you whenever you want and gives you an option to snooze, you might not feel like breaking it. Generally, it might have been tough, but Python's Schedule Module makes our job a lot simpler. 

The Simple Alarm Clock has two parts: The Back-End and the Front-End. The Back-End part contains all the scheduling and snoozing mechanism. The Front-End part is just a simple Tkinter message-box that allows you to decide whether you want to snooze or not. Let's start with the back-end: 

The schedule module is the module that takes the time (in 24 hr format) and executes a function when the clock reaches that time. There are many functions under the schedule module but we will be using the schedule.every().day.at(time).do(function). Then we have a function called schedule.run_pending(), which checks if any schedule function is supposed to run at a given point of time. Putting that inside a infinite while loop keeps checking the function, forming the basic alarm function. 

The next think in the backend is the snooze function. The snooze function just takes the current alarm-time, takes the minutes part by splitting the string, adds 5 to the minutes part, assigns this new time as the alarm-time and starts a new schedule function with this new time. This does not require any extreme Python knowledge. Just some string-manipulation is more than enough for the snooze function. 

When we reach the front-end code, we can do a lot of things. However, the simplest thing we can do is use Tkinter's message-box to give us a question-box with a snooze and cancel option. Clicking the snooze option executes the snooze function and cancel just destroys the Tkinter root window, closing the window and message-box and uses the sys.exit() function to close the program. 

Using these facts, let us try to write the code: 

#Import necessary functions

import schedule

import time

from tkinter import messagebox

from tkinter import *

import sys

root = Tk()

#Defining the snooze function

def snooze():
    global alarm_time
    hh_mm = alarm_time.split(':')
    hh_mm[1] = str(int(hh_mm[1]) + 5)
    alarm_time = ':'.join(hh_mm)
    schedule.every().day.at(alarm_time).do(alarm)
    
#Defining a function for Tkinter Message-Box

def alarm():
    global alarm_time
    MsgBox = messagebox.askquestion ('Alarm-Clock','Time\'s up ! Snooze ?',icon = 'warning')
    if MsgBox == 'yes':
        snooze()
    else:
        root.destroy()
        sys.exit()

        
#Getting Alarm-Time as input and scheduling alarm function for that time
        
alarm_time = input('Enter time as hh:mm: ')

schedule.every().day.at(alarm_time).do(alarm)

#Checking if any schedule functions need to run

while True:
    schedule.run_pending()
    time.sleep(1)

If you look at the output now, here is the message-box: 




Clicking Yes will snooze the Alarm-Clock and Clicking No will close the Alarm-Clock. Simple yet works well and almost like a normal Alarm Clock. 

If you want to improve the code, here are some things you can try:
  • Build a better GUI with Tkinter, Pygame and other similar modules.
  • Use modules like Pygame and Mixer to add tunes to the alarm.
  • Try to add a function to set more than one alarm at the same time. 
This alarm clock may be simple and easy to program, but if you prefer physical alarm clocks, you might want to check these out: 


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