[Daniel Zilinec] appreciates the aesthetics of e-paper and thought it would make a great clock.
The natural appearance of e-paper certainly appeals to a lot of hackers. We’ve seen everything from typewriters to trackers for imaginary money. The Agora clock is designed to be battery powered,;a classic night-stand alarm clock. With its wide angle viewing and even response to light it will be easily viewable even at dawn.
He saves the user a lot of time by designing the PCB up-front. It’s got a charging IC built in, back-light LEDs and pads for buttons. All you need to do is print out the case from the available thingiverse files and assemble. The schematic and firmware are available for the more enterprising hacker to work out as well.
There’s also a somewhat puzzling watch version of the clock. It would certainly be a fashion statement to wear one of these. Still, the is something nice about the organic feel and possible fonts that make it worth considering.
Pretty cool! I’m glad it has a backlight too! I was worried it wouldn’t until I read the article.
So when the power fails one will have an easy answer to when that happened.
Or you’ll be late at work, yet the clock tells you you have plenty of time left. Not sure which one is best.
I guess you guys missed the “designed to be battery powered” bit. There’s no technical info though about current consumption or run time, but if the backlight and bluetooth are kept off and it just updates the display and keeps track of time via interrupt while sleeping the rest of the time then it could have half decent battery life from an 18650.
The 18650 battery will last around 1 year without charging. And when the battery voltage drops bellow 3,5 V it will show a low batter warning on the screen all the time. Then you just need to put the clock on a USB charger.
Actually, it has not backlight in the table clock version. I was experimenting with backlight a lot and I found, that it is unusable. You need to put the light from the front of the display. But then there is a problem with 3D printing the front panel with nice finish. Short time ago I found a solution to this – print the front panel from 2 pieces. I have a working prototype, but it need to improve the design little bit. Then I will make a post about it on Hackaday.io page.
I need buttons (big on top) smalest 4 or 5 or 3+joystick.
god Idea add solar panel for offgrid
SUPER !!! Sloveskooooooooo !!!
I like this, great also for random updates on instrument type displays eg where dwellings used to test power management products and moniotr where I do “some stuff”, ie along with time show an id number of some location and it’s stats of various types…
thanks for post
I looked at this a week or so ago. I didn’t know it had a HaD page.
Agora clock has some interesting unpopulated features on its board design, there’s space for a Bluetooth serial module that would (I suppose) have been used to configure it. It has a rather complete menu system now though, so I guess the BT was deemed an unnecessary addition to the BOM.
I decided not to buy one as I think I’d want something of this form to be smarter. I might yet purchase one and hack it though.