“The clock I built in this project is based on a fact that has been researched for some time, namely how to choose as many colors as possible to be as different as possible visually. The area where I first encountered this problem was mapping. Maps should be really easy to read, easy to interpret and the use of appropriate colors is very important. You can find a very good implementation of an application that chooses the right colors you can find on colorbrewer.
But in many other areas, choosing colors that are easy to distinguish, including by those with color blindness, is just as important: graphical representation of transport lines, metro, buses, trains, the simultaneous display in different graphs of several statistical values, results of database queries in video games, in text editors these are only a few ..
There is a huge literature on this topic, I was simply lost when I started to research this aspect. But of course, I would not like to talk in this article about the theoretical side of the problem, it is far too complicated for an amateur like me and for what I wanted to achieve I didn’t have to know too much :).
However, I would like to introduce to you some tools with which you can quickly and easily generate 10 distinct colors visually. Why just 10? Well, because I wanted to code 10 digits, from 0 to 9, with the help of colors and thus I could display the current time, minute, and second.
Of course my project is not the first one trying to display time with the help of colors. I found some very interesting constructions, some opensource:
4-LED Octal Clock Demands Colorful Math
CHROMATIC Clocks With a Steampunk Twist
Who Could Resist a Color Coded Clock
or even commercial ones:
Chronochrome: A Clock
As you can see the mentioned projects use different color-coding values, but the result is not the best. In order to reach the optimal result (from my point of view), as I said above, I have used some tools that I will present in the next step.
I hope I got your attention and you will read about how I put everything into practice :)”