You can get all sorts of cruel alarm clocks to help you wake up. But programmer Jamie Dixon had a better idea – if you want a sure fire way to get out of your bed, then remove the option of staying in bed entirely. To help his son wake up, Jamie added a remote controlled screw drive to the kid’s bed. Now they can make it tilt the mattress gently until the little sleepyhead slithers off of it.

Jamie’s mod is based on a used hospital bed that he found on Craigslist. The bed had a hydraulic actuator that tilted its mattress vertically or back down at the push of a switch. Jamie and his kids made a new switch for the actuator and connected a servo to it. They then attached the servo and a router to a Netduino. Jamie wrote instructions for the Netduino to receive commands over the local network and control the servo, and finally attached the assembly to his son’s bed. Instead of making the screw drive tilt his the mattress straight up, Jamie opted for a safer approach and had it slowly tilt to one side.

Check out the Microsoft MVP Award Blog or Jamie’s personal blog to find out how you can emulate his mod. If you’re going to do this to your bed, I suggest you add a tub of water where you’ll land. Otherwise you’ll only continue to sleep on the floor.

[via Channel 9]