Triple

As hackers, custom clocks offer a great outlet for us to express our technical expertise and creativity, in a way that's inherently useful to the wider world. Last year I created a seven-segment clock that uses addressable LEDs for lighting, along with a front diffuser made out of a circuit-less PCB – or you might call it a PB, a "printed board."

While interesting, the eventual plan was to make a clock with multiple PCB faces, representing different time zones or other information. After much work, I’m happy to present the latest iteration of "clock 742" (i.e. 7 segments, 42mm in length). It features 85 addressable SK6812 LEDs per board, for a total of 255 individual lights, and uses an ESP32-based Wemos S2 mini for control.

On powerup, the ESP32 logs on to a local network to check the NTP time. It then passes signals from the main controller to the two subsequent lights-only boards, which are scaled programmatically in order to display three time zones in a 24-hour format. Each section slides together in a frame made out of 2020 aluminum extrusion, with electrical connections via male/female header pins.

It's a functional clock, but there are still some improvements that could be made. Daylight savings time still needs to be accounted for in the code (assuming it's not dropped legislatively), and an LDR could be useful to scale color intensity based on the background environment. Finally, the device is set up for capacitive touch interface, which hasn't been implemented yet.

So although I’m pretty proud of this device, it's not quite done. Of course, one might argue that this type of project is never really finished, just in a state that we can enjoy while planning our next improvement!