Wake Up to the Sound of an Artemis Rocket Launch, LEGO Style

My wife is one of those people who has, like, 30 alarms set on her phone, each a few minutes apart, to wake up in the morning. Unlike me, she has a real job she has to wake up for and she doesn’t want to be late. Maybe I should build her this LEGO Artemis Rocket alarm clock designed by Milos Rasic over at element14 Presents.

This is an extremely loud alarm clock that nobody could possibly sleep through. It is also a rocket — NASA’s Artemis — that launches when the alarm goes off, which is really cool and sure to make mornings more enjoyable.

The Artemis rocket model is courtesy of the fine folks at LEGO. It is a LEGO Technic kit with a hand-cranked leadscrew mechanism that lifts up the rocket and separates the two booster rockets on the side. That’s such a neat feature that Rasic just had to incorporate it into the alarm clock, so a stepper motor turns the crank when the alarm activates.

An Arduino UNO R4 WiFi controls that stepper motor and also displays the time on an LED matrix. A self-hosted web interface lets the user set their time zone and the alarm time.

Of course, the most crucial part of any alarm clock design is the noise-maker and Rasic took that to the extreme by attaching a megaphone. The Arduino activates that through a relay, causing the megaphone to start blasting sound at the sleeper’s head. That sound can be whatever they want, because the megaphone is a digital model with a recording function. The user can simply record the sound they like, set the volume to maximum, and hope their eardrums survive the morning assault.

All of the electronic components, including those from the megaphone, fit inside a 3D-printed enclosure. Rasic designed that to look like part of the rocket launch pad’s base for a cohesive appearance. That 3D model, the schematics, and the code are all available over on element14, if you’d like to build your own LEGO Artemis alarm clock.