App: Alarms

In the main view, you will see your alarms.

To add an alarm, press the + button near the bottom of the screen.

Note: The “Doppler System Alarm” is the main alarm tied to the alarm bell button on the top of the Sandman Doppler. It cannot be deleted from the app, but it can be configured and turned on or off.

Note: Alarms labeled “Alexa alarm” can only be modified or deleted using your Alexa, this is a limitation of Amazon’s Alexa integration and we are working on it with them to fix or improve this. These alarms can be modified from the Alexa app.

In the Add Alarm screen, you can set the time of the alarm, if and how often it repeats, label the alarm name, set the alarm sound, and alarm volume.

Press “Save” to save the alarm and turn it on, or press “Cancel” to cancel editing it.

To turn an alarm on or off, press the toggle to the right of it. In the example below, 10:00 AM is turned off, while 9:00 AM is turned on. When an alarm is turned on, the alarm bell icon on the top left of the Doppler’s front display will light up.

To edit an alarm, slide the alarm to the left to expose the pencil icon. Tapping this icon allows you to edit the alarm.

To delete an alarm, slide the alarm to the left to expose the red trash icon. Tapping this icon will delete that alarm.

When the alarm executes (alarm sounds coming from the Doppler) you can control it directly via the top buttons. 

To turn the alarm off, press the alarm bell button located on the top of the Doppler towards the top right of the buttons.

To snooze the alarm, press the large snooze button (any of the media control buttons) on the top of the Doppler. The alarm will snooze for 9 minutes.

Discussion

34 Comments

  1. Are we supposed to be able to hear the alarm sounds though the app? I keep tapping the play buttons but don’t hear anything. I guess it will be a surprise tomorrow morning.

    1. Hi Jason, the alarm preview plays out of the Doppler speakers. If you aren’t hearing the preview, please close and reopen the app.

  2. Hi, how do I change the alarm volume? When I play the alarm sound from the app,
    it come out the Doppler quite loud, when the alarm “executes”, it starts out silent then
    slowly ramps up to a soft volume that I will sleep right through.
    I have tried all the volume settings and it doesn’t make any difference.

    Thanks,
    -pat

    1. Hi Pat, we are working on some bugs that have caused some issues when previewing the alarm sound but this should work fine. Can you please reach out to support?

      Thanks!

  3. I’m running into another issue with the alarms. How do you turn alarms off until the next time they are scheduled to sound? I have an alarm scheduled for 6:45 monday-friday, but when the alarm sounds, pressing the “bell” button turns the alarm completely off. After that, the only way I can seem to find to turn the alarm back on again is through the app. Is that correct?

    1. Hey Jason, the scheduled alarm should turn the bell button back on 23 hours before the next alarm. This is done that you think all alarms are off when you turn off the alarms in the morning and then they will be on and ready to go when you go to bed at night. Please give it a shot!

    2. I’m having some confusion with the alarm. I hit snooze but it never goes off again. Then the green light goes on but in the app it’s showing the alarm switch toggled off. I think this whole system with the alarms is way too convoluted. I don’t care for having to go on the app every damn day to make sure it’s actually on.

    3. Hi Jerry, sorry you’re having issues. Can you try restarting and see if that fixes the issue? We would love to hear your thoughts on how to make the alarms more intuitive. Can you send an email to support@sandmanclocks.com? Thanks!

  4. I’m having a similar problem to Pat in that attempting to set my alarm sounds, they play back at full volume. I will reach out to support on that.
    I was also wondering if there was going to be a way to have something else as a wake sound or were we limited to what is programmed into the app?

    1. Hey Mike, for now, the Sandman app has limited sound options. If you’d like unlimited sound options, just ask Alexa and you have an unlimited number of sound options. Thanks so much!

  5. I’m having the same problem as the other folks. The alarm sounds are at full volume, irrespective of how I set them in the app or via the buttons on top of the Sandman

  6. We already have an Echo Dot in our bedroom on my wife’s side of the bed. When I say “Alexa…” even in a low voice, the Echo Dot responds but not my Sandman. I named the Sandman (rather unimaginatively) “Saandman” — is there any way I can get it to respond to voice commands using this name?

    1. Max, you can’t change the wakeword on the Doppler. Alexa only at this time. Sorry about that! If both your wife’s dot and the Doppler are on the same Alexa account only one will respond at a time. You can also change the wakeword of the dot to a couple of other options.

  7. Is there a way for the alarm to wake you up via SiriusXM or some other music source versus the alarm sounds already built into Sandman?

    1. Hey Carl, you can Ask Alexa to wake you up to a specific station on SiriusXM. Try a command like: “Alexa, set alarm at 7am to station 100 on SiriusXM”

  8. Hey guys, received my Doppler earlier this morning thank you.
    Is there any other way to wake up to music other than using Alexa?

  9. @Alex Tramiel I think that either I am having a bug with my alarms on my Doppler, or there’s something that does not work in the way I am expecting it to function.

    Last night, before I went to sleep, I made sure my two alarms were set. I have one set to go off at 6:45am and one at 8:00am. I know I set them, because I set them both as I got into bed and noticed the bell indicator was not on. I went into the app and turned both on. This morning, the 6:45am one went off, and I pressed the bell button on the control panel. I believe it and the indicator light then turned red. The 8:00am alarm never sounded. at approximately 8:10am, I looked at the clock and the button and indicator light were still red. I then opened the app, and found that the 8:00am alarm was switched to off. Again, I KNOW I turned it on before I went to sleep.

    Can you try to figure out what is happening? Does turning off an occurring alarm turn off all alarms set for the day? If so, that’s a real inconvenience, as often couples use one alarm clock with 2 separate times, one for each person. If that’s not the case, could it be something else, or something I did in my sleep?

    1. Hey Jason, the alarm button will turn off the next armed alarm until there are no more armed alarms. We are updating the manual to explain how this works in more detail. Can you reach out to support and we can figure out what is going on? Thanks!

  10. Hi,

    Just wanted to chime in. Just had it set up.
    Couple of notes so far:
    1. Many screens here seem to be showing the iOS version. Which is a bit different from from the Android app. May want to add these differences (at least in text)
    2. Is it correct that the “System Alarm” also can’t have any repetition set? (Repeat mon-fri) May want to remove those letters (SMTWTFS) at the bottom to avoid confusion
    3. Haven’t tested them all, but some Gentle and Playful (.mp3; not sure why you want to include this in the listing BTW) do not loop well. There’s a quite annoying gap.

    Would be nice to see this and the already promised improvements. Keep up the good work!

    1. Also:
      When playing music via the bluetooth connection (using Spotify). The media buttons do not function (well).
      – Play/pause button: Doesn’t pause. It does resume when I pause it in Spotify itself
      – next/prev buttons: Do not skip to next or previous songs
      – Volume buttons do work

      The doppler makes some ticking noices at random. But especially right before playing something. Guessing it is the speaker activating.

    2. We will be unifying the iOS and Android versions so they are the same. But you’re correct, they are slightly different now.

      Currently, the system alarm can’t be repeated. You’ll have to make an Alexa alarm or App alarm for that. Thanks for the tip with Gentle and Playful!

      Are your ticking noises still happening? Can you please send a video to support?

      Thanks for the tip with Spotify via bluetooth. We will be adding Spotify connect support natively soon.

  11. Regarding the Alarm im a person that likes to wake up to the radio and there is no way to set the alarm to do that
    would this be something to work on?

  12. Hello- I seem to have had all my issues of alarms going off or not going off sorted out, but I have the same issue as a poster above- the “ramping up” of the alarm sound is actually a detriment, as I can sleep right through it. (what can I say, I’m a heavy sleeper)

    I would love to see an option where the alarm can go full volume from the start. When I’ve seen this feature in clocks before, I’ve seen it as an option, not as the default.

    I’m also curious when/if there will be an update to the app, possibly adding new features?

    1. Jason, we will be adding a toggle for ascending alarms along with a bunch of new features in the app soon. Stay tuned!

  13. Things have been going well since I received my Sandman until about two weeks ago. Since then, I don’t seem to have the same snooze functionality. I hit the large snooze button area and the bell slowly strobes in green. It just doesn’t actually sound again at nine minutes. Unfortunately; I don’t have time to find out if and or when it actually does play again. It did catch me out the first time but thankfully my body clock woke me with just enough time to make it to work. Since then; I have simply been much more mindful Of the time. Any thoughts?

    1. Hi Mike, can you try power cycling your Doppler? This will fix the problem. We have a bug we are trying to track down where this can happen. Thanks!

  14. Hi there, it seems only bluetooth is used to set/change the alarms via the app. Is that correct? If so, will it be possible to use wifi instead? The reason I ask is that often my doppler can’t be found in the app when I’m a bit further away from my device.

    1. Tony, currently you can use Alexa for alarms or BLE. The app doesn’t work over wifi yet. We are currently working on switching to a wifi cloud model soon.

  15. I have been in touch with you previously, but am now getting so frustrated with the alarm. Ever since I have had my Sandman, I have set the alarm for 7:00am to wake up to my favorite radio station Monday – Friday. It stays on for exactly 1 hour which I love. Several months ago, one morning I woke to the sound of what sounded like a harp. I cleared All alarms and reset. It worked well for a bit, but a few weeks ago it would come on at 7:00 and then shut off at 7:04. Today, it came on then shut off 4 minutes later and then came back on at 7:10 for 2 minutes. There is no consistency to how it is working. I have unplugged it, let it sit all day and that has not helped. I feel like I need to have my old alarm there to be sure I am awakened. Please help! Also, wondering if the radio is programmed to stay on a certain length of time through the Sandman’s auto settings. I set the alarm thru Alexa.

    1. Hi Debra, please reach back out to support about this issue. Something doesn’t sound like it’s configured or set up right. This could also be a transient error with the internet radio. We can check out the logs and figure out what happened. Thanks!

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