This LEGO alarm clock is as loud as a rocket launch

So many of us struggle to wake up in the morning and end up sleeping through our alarms. You may even be the kind of person who will continue sleeping, even as your alarm clock is blaring right next to you for 10 minutes. If so, you’ll want to check out this megaphone-powered LEGO alarm clock built by Milos Rasic.

The starting point for this project was LEGO’s new NASA Artemis Space Launch System kit, which is an interactive model of the Artemis II that is scheduled for launch within the next month or two. It is interactive because there is a hand-cranked mechanism that lifts the rocket and jettisons the two side boosters, which is pretty neat and something that Rasic incorporated into the project.

To convert that LEGO kit into an alarm clock, Rasic 3D-printed a launch pad that acts as an enclosure for a few electronic components. The most important of those is an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board. It displays the time on an LED matrix and cranks the launch mechanism with a stepper motor. It also plays the alarm sound — anything the user chooses to record — through a repurposed megaphone by “pushing” the play button on that megaphone’s control board with a relay.

The Arduino sketch sets the UNO R4 WiFi up with a self-hosted web interface that the user can access via a computer or smartphone. That interface lets them set their time zone, the alarm time, and enable the alarm. It even displays some status information, like voltage level (useful when using a battery).

That megaphone should be loud enough to wake even the heaviest sleeper from their slumber and seeing the rocket lift off should make waking up a little bit more pleasant.