My DIY wall clock remains one of my favorite home projects. Growing up, I was always curious about electronic circuitry—resistors and transistors and all these cute little mysterious components I would see lying around in my family home. But it was always hands off! Don’t touch that! They don’t concern you! One of the many tragedies of being a girl first born into an Asian family.
It was only with the full adulting life and time on my hands post-school then was I was finally able to dive into hardware projects like this one and learn more about how it all works. Remember Radio Shack and Fry’s Electronics? Man I miss those places…
The design for this is actually very simple: an ATmega328 microcontroller as the brains like that you’d find on the popular-back-then Arduino Uno, a real-time clock module that uses a real crystal oscillator and backup coin battery power, an IR receiver and a leftover remote from a retired device, and a WHOLE lot of single pixel RGB led lights. The face plate is just two sets of laser cut acrylic. The LED dots represent the minutes and seconds with two separate lit-up dots, and the lines are the hours.
The crazy part about this though…is that I individually soldered each and every one of the 60 LEDs that represent the minutes and seconds. And each LED has 6 solder points for the RGB in/out chaining, meaning that just for the outer ring alone, not including the hour hands, I did about 357 teeny tiny solders, WITH shrink tubing on each. What insanity drove me to do that I don’t know, I was younger back then…
For the clock controls, I was able to repurpose an old remote that you’d find with many LED strip lights and decode the signals from it. The remote can change the colors for every one of the 24 hour hands (orange for sunset, yellow for sunrise for example), set the minute and second colors, and set the time.
Since then I’ve studied more on topics of electronic design and have made other devices, and previously I had even made my own smart home controller with a phone app that controlled RF switches before smart home even really became a thing! But almost ten years later, this clock is still up in my living room and remains the only wall clock in the entire house. The battery backup still works great and is able to still keep time in the event of power outages (without lights). It’s digital, but it’s also analog!