Capacitor Alarm Clock
I made an alarm clock that blows up capacitors to wake you up. There are more details on the Github repo but it's made from an esp32-c3 as the microcontroller, with 3 capacitor slots. There are relays on each capacitor slot to put 15v reverse voltage on the capacitor, with 5.1 ohm resistors on each slot for current limiting in case the capacitor shorts out. I also chucked in an SSD1315 OLED to show the time and a menu to configure it, although there's a web UI as well. The esp32 also means you can fetch the time from NTP. It also functions as a small heater since I used LDOs to step down 15v…
Capacitor Alarm Clock launched on June 14, 2026 with 153 votes, #214 of 22,647 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Capacitor Alarm Clock is an alarm device built around an ESP32-C3 microcontroller that wakes users by deliberately destroying capacitors with reversed 15V voltage. It features three capacitor slots with relay controls and current-limiting resistors, an OLED display for time and configuration menus, a web-based interface, and NTP time synchronization. The device also generates heat as a side effect of its power conversion design.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
capacitor blow up human wake up. Contribute to ArcaEge/capacitor-alarm-clock development by creating an account on GitHub.
This was originally inspired by ElectroBOOM's capacitor alarm video ; this is like a safer (?), more practical and more useable-ish version of that. Take care when using this, and only do so if you know what you're doing. Capacitor explosions are quite violent and the fumes aren't nice to breathe. This project is mostly a high-effort joke and not something practical to use Images of schematics and more are under the PCB README . A BOM is available under production . I'd recommend using JLCPCB as they seem to have the lowest prices. CAD files for the shell and PCB are under cad/ . The README there contains more info, but the Onshape project is available here . To build and flash the…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
I made an alarm clock that blows up capacitors to wake you up. There are more details on the Github repo but it's made from an esp32-c3 as the microcontroller, with 3 capacitor slots. There are relays on each capacitor slot to put 15v reverse voltage on the capacitor, with 5.1 ohm resistors on each slot for current…
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