dawn simulator schematics problems

I intend to build a simple dawn simulator for my wife. She likes the
idea of waking up to the increased brightness of the bedside lamp
rather then the alarm clock noise, and that sounds good to me

I'm thinking basics here: an off-the-shelf household timer (to set
the wakeup time) and a custom dimmer circuit that brings my lamp from 0
to 100% in, say, in 20 minutes time or so.

I've looked around all the usenet groups for directions on how to
build this thing: most of solutions points to various home automation
solutions. That might work fine, but I'd like to put my old soldering
iron to use again - it's about time .

The problem is that I can't find a detailed schematic description.
There are references to alt.binaries.schematics.electronic but nor
Google or my ISP allows access, so I can't see if that would do it.

I plan to use Bill Bowden's (url below) dimmer circuit schema, I just
need some help with the dimensions of the diodes and some capacitors.
I've put the schema up, with all items marked, at:
http://www.designpending.com/fredrik/dawn.htm

Anybody that can suggest roughly which diodes to use?
BTW: do you expect this solution to be noisy?

Thanks,
..fredrik

 

[John Popelish]

fredrik_aldrig@hotmail.com wrote:

I intend to build a simple dawn simulator for my wife. She likes the
idea of waking up to the increased brightness of the bedside lamp
rather then the alarm clock noise, and that sounds good to me

I'm thinking basics here: an off-the-shelf household timer (to set
the wakeup time) and a custom dimmer circuit that brings my lamp from 0
to 100% in, say, in 20 minutes time or so.

I've looked around all the usenet groups for directions on how to
build this thing: most of solutions points to various home automation
solutions. That might work fine, but I'd like to put my old soldering
iron to use again - it's about time .

The problem is that I can't find a detailed schematic description.
There are references to alt.binaries.schematics.electronic but nor
Google or my ISP allows access, so I can't see if that would do it.

I plan to use Bill Bowden's (url below) dimmer circuit schema, I just
need some help with the dimensions of the diodes and some capacitors.
I've put the schema up, with all items marked, at:
http://www.designpending.com/fredrik/dawn.htm

Anybody that can suggest roughly which diodes to use?
BTW: do you expect this solution to be noisy?

Thanks,
.fredrik

This sort of thing is probably best done with a microprocessor
controlling the phase of a lamp dimmer. But you can also just buy
one.
http://www.serenityhealth.com/sun_alarm_clock_descript.html
--
John Popelish

 

Ouch! I suppose I should look at other solutions, thanks Ross for
making that clear!
Does anybody know whether there were more useful solutions at
alt.binaries.schematics.electronic?