I tend to have trouble sleeping a full night in the summer when it gets light early, which has led me to cover up my bedroom window so my room stays dark until I wake up. This creates the problem that I don't know what time it is when I wake up, and I often wake up in the middle of the night when I've had just a few hours of sleep. Since I'm always groggy for the first 20 minutes or so after waking up even if I'm well rested, I can't tell if it's 6am or 9am, which leads me to reach over and check my phone to see what time it is. The small amount of movement and cognition required to do this is enough to make it hard for me to get back to sleep. It also is unpleasant to always wake up in a dark-ish room. Daybreak is designed to wake us up, so waking up in the dark involves more of a fight against grogginess.
I've been able to solve both problems by making a configurable dawn and a minimal clock using the LED strips on my ceiling.
Using the dimmest possible setting, I have the program turn on one pair of red LEDs per hour after midnight. That way, if I wake up early, I can see how many red dots there are are and decide whether I'd like to get up. It takes very minimal cognition to see how many dots there are on the ceiling, so I can still get back to sleep if I want.
Otherwise, dawn comes at an hour of my choosing, and the lights gradually begin to come on. The video here shows a greatly sped-up version of what it looks like. It's hard to tell from the video since iphones can easily handle the 10,000x dynamic range of exposure, but the room goes from an extremely dim red at night to a bright 200W of white light at the end of the dawn cycle. I programmed the dawn to roughly follow the color journey of a real dawn for aesthetic purposes, but it's probably not necessary for my goals.
If I'm up late, I can just set dawn to start a couple of hours later.
There might be some commercial products in this space, so if you run into similar issues and don't want to program your own lighting, I would not be surprised if there's something off-the-shelf for you.
