This Flux Capacitor Alarm Clock Means You'll Never Be Too Late to Get Back to the Future

Semi-pseudonymous maker Jéjé l'ingé (Jéjé the Engineer) has published a guide to building your very own flux capacitor from Back to the Future — but one which operates as a functional alarm clock, rather than driving the user backwards or forwards through time.

"It's an alarm clock and once the alarm goes off," Jéjé explains, "it randomly plays sounds from the BTTF [Back to the Future] soundtrack. Setup/Stop button set[s] the alarm time, hour + minute button activate[s] or deactivate[s] the alarm ('0' alarm off, '1' alarm on)."

The body of the flux capacitor is, naturally enough, 3D-printed then painted to give a metallic finish roughly matching the prop seen in the film franchise. Short addressable RGB LED strips are inserted in the iconic Y shape, then placed behind diffusers and decorated with fake coils.

The electronics are driven by an Espressif ESP32 module, connected to an MP3 board with its own microSD storage and a 40mm speaker plus a red seven-segment four-digit display for the time. Buttons are also included for controlling the clock, including a five-minute snooze mode should you not be quite ready to get back to the future when the alarm triggers.

The full build guide is published to Instructables, with downloadable STL files for the 3D-printed parts; the source code, which includes a choice of hard-coded offline operation or a connected web portal version, is available on GitHub under an unspecified license.