Here’s a video of a nifty Exploding Piano Alarm Clock that was recently made in a graduate product design class at MIT. One of MAKE’s former interns, Jake McKenzie, was part of the team who created it. They based their project on the traditional piano drop held every spring off the MIT Baker House.
The premise is simple and aggravating: the piano and its color-coded legs explode once the alarm goes off. The user’s task is to gather up all the parts and put the legs in their corresponding color slots. All while the alarm annoyingly beeps at you. The rub: the color slots move around, so you have to be agile (and awake) to get the correct legs in the correct slots. A knob on the bottom allows you to adjust the difficulty by speeding up the rate of the color changes.
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