“The story of this clock goes back a long way - more than 30 years. My father pioneered this idea when I was just 10 years old, long before the LED revolution - back when LED’s where 1/1000 the brightness of their current blinding brilliance. A true innovator, he coded in assembly language and hand wired each individual LED (an impressive feat of patience and determination)! His original version still works to this day.
I wanted to pick it up where he left off and leverage the advances in technology to make a beautiful clock that was web-connected, colorful, fun to play with and full of interest. It’s advanced to the point where we would like to release the clock to the public as an open source project but also provide finished products to those interested in purchasing. See our kickstarter campaign (begins Monday April, 16th) if you find yourself interested in supporting!
The clock as it stands today has a host of features and is a fully finished and functioning product. We are very pleased with how it turned out both in terms of quality and functionality but also in terms of the feature set and stability. The clock syncs every minute with a timeserver ensuring that the time will always be perfect. Users need only set the timezone once, enable daylight savings mode and they will never need to worry about setting the clock again!
52 different animations with adjustable color, speed and brightness give the user precise control and infinite variation. Favorite modes are saved in memory. Light timers and daily events can be set which allow users to visually be notified at the selected time. Special holiday modes can add festivity to your house during Halloween, New Years or Christmas. We even have a special mode for pi day where the clock animates the digits of pi for 100 digits every hour.
The clock is powered by a web connected Node MCU ESP8266 and is programmed using the arduino language and popular c++libraries that come standard in the arduino platform. Want to make one? Here’s how:”