Adafruit word clock

The Adafruit design (or something very much like it) was in Make magazine recently and caught my eye. I had a stack of cheapo 8 x 8 led matrix boards on hand and a host of arduino based controllers. So game on. I did not like the look of the original case nor the hardware required, so a new case was in order. Also, the cheap matrix was a bit bigger than the Adafruit version so some scaling had to be done to the letter grid and the filter grid. I decide to use a Teensy 3.2 that can be configured to have a built in RTC ( by adding a crystal oscillator) in place of the suggested external rtc board. Lastly, the cheapo matrix appears to be a zigzag matrix while the code from the make project was written for a progressive matrix. This twist plus the change in RTC led to a bunch of software changes. In other words, similar design but not really as there were changes to all the parts.

The last tweak I added was to use the color of the words to show how many minutes to add to the displayed time (since it only shows in 5 minute increments) red = +0, yellow =+1, green = +2, blue = +3, purple = +4

word%20clock


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Great work! Thanks for sharing the design, I have a couple of the cheepo boards this will work great with! You should really post it to free laser designs so others can easily find it. Clever idea using color to add more accuracy to the time display!

done

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Fast forward almost 3 years and clockmaking has become a reasonable business for me. Enough so that I have designed my own circuit board for the electronics and hired an assistant to run these parts on the forge. The pandemic slowed things down for a year but business is picking up lately as we return to “normal” life.

My designs have evolved along the way.

At first, I did not like how the viewing angle was narrow on this original so changed to a design with multi payer front face. This change opened up the viewing angle and allowed colored faces. I made a bunch of these but have stopped making them lately in favor of larger versions.

I wanted to make a larger clock so I updated the design to use a 16 x 16 matrix. This matrix is a larger version of the one used in the original design. This larger matrix has 4 times as many leds. This results in 4 LEDS per letter. So, some software tweaks were needed to map the leds to the letters. The matrix is 6 x 6 inches and the resulting clock is about 8.5 x 8.5 inches. This size is my best seller. That design saw a few improvements as well, with the addition of an additional spacer layer, the initial spacer/grid being attached to the walls of the box, and a trim ring that tidies up the front being the most obvious. I also played with a few different shapes for the clock body, with hearts and more rounded boxes. I ended back with a rounded square box that is not far from my original shape.

The black led acrylic has been a recent option for the square clocks. It makes a great front that only shows the letters that are illuminated. Results in a look that some say approaches neon. My son in law calls it “retro”. I like it a lot. The initial prototype sold right away. The next batch (4 of them) will be hitting the gallery today.

I added a few vertical and horizontal word clocks that are based on edge lit acrylic. The latest version of these use RGBW leds for added brightness. The first of these will be hitting the gallery today as well.

Along the way, I have also tried to make even larger sizes of clocks. The passthrough helped with those. The challenge there was getting enough light from the LED source and finding an alternative to the prefab led grids used in the smaller square clocks. I tried variants of strings of wired LEDs but never really got enough light out of them. They were also hard to assemble and made the clock thicker than I wanted. I then tried strips of leds. The strips worked to provide enough light and allowed a thin clock design but were also hard to assemble reliably (too many ways for all of those wire connections to fail). Despite those challenges, I managed a few big clocks that were presentable enough for sale (and a bunch that were not). More recently I have developed a design using 4 of the 16 x 16 matrixes. This is an expensive choice and overkill on brightness as 16 leds/per letter provides way more light than needed. On the positive side, it looks great and was fairly easy to assemble despite being a prototype. The first of these is hitting the gallery today. I am very happy with the result. Probably more to follow with this design.

I am having fun. None of this would be possible without my Glowforge.

View of the gallery from a few weeks ago (Tracy Park Gallery, Malibu CA) with many clocks:


Note the heart shape in the bottom row , an example of a difficult larger design also on the bottom row, and a more rounded version in green on the middle row.

Vertical word clock version 3, brighter and more colorful

The latest big (15-inch) word clock. With Black LED acrylic face and way too many LEDs inside. (before adding front trim ring).

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I know what you mean. My ADHD is going crazy. Ooh, I Gotta try this! Ooh, I wanna make that! And in the end, nothing gets done. :sleepy:

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