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3D printed clockface

David Johnson-Davies makes the most beautiful projects on the face of the Earth. Great design, always practical and honed down to the bare essentials.

One which caught my eye a few weeks ago was a wonderful 8x8 LED matrix based clock.

I duly whipped up the clock according to his instructions, the only wrinkle being that the I2C based LED matrix modules needed to have solder bridges which result in a "hard wiring" of their I2C address.

On the breadboard the clock worked fine, so next up I decided to make a 3D printed fascia to fit the matrix modules plus a couple of switches.

Of course I forgot space for the battery, so the final design needed a couple of extra centimetres at the bottom to allow for a 18650 cell.

Next I used FreeCad and then Ultimaker Cura to first design and then slice the 3D model. I go into some detail for these processes in the video below.

The whole thing then needed some soldering and assembling and "voilà" we have a clock! I put some M3 bolts in the corners to stick to magnets and so it now sits on the fridge happily keeping time. I love the dissolve effect as it transitions from one minute to the next.

It's a bit battery hungry (a changed needed every 2 weeks or so), but considering I'm using cheap rechargeables at the moment it is not such an issue.

On my "to do" list is to further limit the brightness of the display as suggested by David on his original blog, plus modify the code to make a 24-hour version.