Why is it sometimes digital alarms sometimes don't go off? Every once in a while, you find that when they reach the appointed hour, they simply remain silent. The old-style 'bell & ringer' mechanical alarm clocks never failed AFAICR. Why do electronic ones sometimes do so?
The battery is usually too close to flat to make an audible noise - CMOS logic and LCDs usually keeps on working until the battery voltage collapses, but you can't draw enough current when the battery is close to end of life to make an audible sound.
The first thing to do when anything battery powered goes wonky is to put in a new battery. Checking the battery voltages while you are doing that can be informative.
Piezo-electric speakers can get damaged when you drop the device, even the though the shock isn't big enough to damage the rest of the electronics.
With a mechanical alarms you can see any damage. Modern stuff isn't quite as easy to inspect.
I'm afraid I've still had alarms fail when none of the above possible causes applies.
Sorry, John, but I can't have Linux maligned. AFA stability is concerned, it's always been *way* more solid than Windows. It's Windows that has millions of lines of code and thousands of bugs, not Linux.
That has to be the silliest post I've ever seen. Who would put enough memory into a alarm clock to hold a million lines of code? There are few more demented implications in there, but why waste bandwidth on spelling them out?
This rather misses the point that that application itself is extremely undemanding, and is almost certainly handled by a single application-specific integrated circuit. You'd design it using Verilog or VHDL, if you were starting from scratch, which nobody in the industry would be.
About the only interesting are in the design would be user interface, and Linux wouldn't help there.
Linux wouldn't come into it.
I listed the most likely failure modes. Your judgement about what caused your alarm to fail isn't going to be all that reliable - which is presumably why you asked the question.
I've currently got an electronic alarm clock that doesn't work - the problem that caused me to take it apart was that the press-button control contacts had stopped working. The ultra hook-up wire that connected the electronics to the battery broke off in the dismantling process, and the wire is too thin to let me solder it back on. I've got a reel of heavier insulated hook-up wire around somewhere, but I haven't found it yet (nor looked very hard - I've got several electronic alarm clocks and most of them work, and all the others keep good time).
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