Linear LED Clock Looks Decidedly Vintage

Linear LED clock displaying the time using different-colored triangles.

We just love a good clock around here, and something about those triangles gives this linear LED clock a deliciously mid-century vibe. If you’ve read these pages for any length of time, you know that [andrei.erdei] loves clocks as much as we do, and is always coming up with interesting ways of displaying the passage of time.

Two upward-facing triangles sandwich one downward-facing triangle, and they are lighting up as follows: right, left, middle.This one is a remix of some other linear RGB clocks, but the result is distinctly [andrei.erdei]’s style. There’s nothing crazy going on under the hood here — it’s essentially a Wemos D1 mini running a strip of RGBs, and the microcontroller connects to a Wi-Fi router to get the time from a server. The magic is in the programming and the way the clock is read.

The brief but thorough demo video after the break does a much better job of explaining the display by showing various times of the day, but we’ll give it a shot. For one thing, it uses 24-hour time exclusively. There are four groups of triangles; yellow, red, green, and blue which correspond to tens and units of hours, and tens and units of minutes.

The triangles light up in groups of three in the order depicted in the animation. At midnight, none of the triangles are lit up. Again, it’s best explained in the video, looking at various times of day.  Plus you can see the neat-o startup animation.

Are you more into sound than blinkenlights? Then this customizable bird clock may be for you.

3 thoughts on “Linear LED Clock Looks Decidedly Vintage

  1. With all ws28xx strip projects, I find the missing cooling slots while completely isolating the LEDs concerning. PETG/ABS is not optional with this designs…
    Other than that: really neat project, gonna build one for sure!

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.