Summary
An Arduino Uno R4 WiFi turns the Lego Artemis SLS kit into a real alarm clock with liftoff.
A stepper motor raises the rocket at alarm time while a hacked megaphone blasts launch sounds.
Custom web interface on board syncs time and sets alarms – an amazijng way to wake up.
If you drew a Venn diagram including people who like tinkering with electronics and people who enjoy playing with Lego, you end up with just a circle. We’ve seen plenty of times in the past where people have combined the two, such as these projects that combine a Raspberry Pi with Lego.
While they’re all amazing in their own right, only a few can hold a candle to this amazing Arduino-based project connected to the Lego NASA Artemis SLS set. It’s not just a cool-looking project, either; it also works as an alarm clock for what quite possibly is both the coolest and nerdiest way to wake up in the morning.
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Spoiler alert: its secret weapon is a megaphone
In a post on the ESP32 subreddit, tinkerer Milos shows off what they’ve been working on, and I’m really impressed. They took the Lego kit for the NASA Artemis SLS and combined it with the power of an Arduino Uno to create an alarm clock that wakes them up with style:
I converted the LEGO NASA Artemis Space Launch System (SLS) set into a fully functional alarm clock powered by an Arduino Uno R4 WiFi.
A stepper motor drives the original launch mechanism so the rocket physically rises at alarm time, and a hacked megaphone plays rocket launch sounds instead of a normal buzzer. The clock runs on a custom web interface for setting alarms and syncing time.
You can check out the build in the video above, and you can also read how it was made on the Element14 website. My personal favorite part of this project is when Milos wanted to make the alarm impossible to sleep through, so they got their hands on a megaphone and hacked into it so they could activate it using their system. I’m not sure if ensuring you wake up in the morning is worth the shock, but hey, it’s Milo’s project, and if they oversleep that badly, I can see why they’d want it.