Realize the Truth… There Is No Word Clock

Do you always look at it encoded? – Well you have to. The image translators work for the construct program.

Word clocks are supposed to de-encode time into a more readable format. Luckily [Xose Pérez] managed to recover the encoded time signal of the simulation we are all living in with his word clock that displays time using a stylish Matrix code animation.

[Xose] already built his own versions of [Philippe Chrétien’s] Fibonacci Clock and [Jeremy Williams’s] Game Frame, and while doing so he designed a nice little PCB. It’s powered by an ATmega328p, features an RTC with backup battery, an SD-card socket, and it’s ready to drive a bunch of WS2812Bs aka NeoPixels. Since he still had a few spare copies of his design in stock, his new word clock is also driven by this board.

The clock itself is basically a sandwich with a laser-cut smoked acrylic panel for the front and a transparent sheet of acrylic as back support. In between goes a laser-cut cardboard letter mask, a piece of white paper as a diffuser, a 3D printed black matrix, as well as a flexible 16×16 WS2812B panel.

Besides the Matrix effect, [Xose] also implemented a few other display modes as well as multi-language support in his firmware. All CAD data and the firmware for the clock are available in a Bitbucket repository, and there’s also one for the board’s Gerber files, so you can replicate this build with ease. [Xose’s] clock currently supports Spanish and Catalan, but both the firmware and OpenScad file for the mask can easily be modified to add other languages. Enjoy the video below, where [Xose] offers you two pills demonstrates his build:

Filed under: clock hacks