In my first semester as a Freshman at Illinois, I took IEFX Projects, an ENG 198 course focused on letting students work on their own self-assigned projects to completion.
This fully automated alarm clock, which I built with Chris Marry and Steve Hefferman as a final project for ENG 198: IEFX, can turn the rod on a set of venetian blinds to let in the sunlight in the morning. My responsibilities were to construct the circuit board and program an Arduino backend to mirror the functions of a real alarm clock.