Beautiful Linear RGB Clock

Yup, another clock project. But here, [Jan] builds something that would be more at home in a modern art museum than in the dark recesses of a hacker cave. It’s not hard to read the time at all, it’s accurate, and it’s beautiful. It’s a linear RGB LED wall clock.

7512951486134540347You won’t have to learn the resistor color codes or bizarre binary encodings to tell what time it is. There are no glitzy graphics here, or modified classic timepieces. This project is minimal, clean, and elegant. Twelve LEDs display the hours, six and nine LEDs take care of the minutes in add-em-up-coded decimal. (It’s 3:12 in the banner image.)

The technical details are straightforward: WS2812 LEDs, an Arduino, three buttons, and a RTC. You could figure that out by yourself. But go look through the log about building the nice diffusing plexi and a very clean wall-mounting solution. It’s the details that separate this build from what’s hanging on our office wall. Nice job, [Jan].

12 thoughts on “Beautiful Linear RGB Clock

    1. You’re right. Indeed there are 12, 5, 9 active LEDs, not 12, 6, 9 as written in the article!
      The 5 LEDs for 10 Minutes each was the only way to keep the clock this short.

      It’s not perfect but was a fun project to build.

        1. No problem. I especially like the feature of his where the lights for a given digit randomly shift around within their area. It’s cool, plus it (along with symmetry) helps justify having three LEDs for the tens of hours, even though you only need two, even for 24-hour time.

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