If you happen to really must know the time, you may look at your smartwatch, cellphone, or one of many a number of digital clocks scattered all through any given location. That’s sensible and wise, but additionally sort of boring. When understanding the time is much less essential than having an expertise, you’ve got a chance to get artistic together with your clock design. Illusionmanager definitely exercised that proper when they constructed the Pingo clock, which shows the time as coloration.
Pingo does not have bodily arms or a digital readout. At first look, it simply seems like a glowing disc of colourful diffuse mild. It’s a actually, actually enticing design that ought to please all eyes, but it surely is not instantly apparent how one can decipher the time. If you happen to look intently, nonetheless, you may see that there are indicators across the perimeter that characterize the hour and minute arms of an analog clock. The actual look relies on the impact mode that you’ve Pingo set to, however there will probably be some form of stable blotch of coloration or absence of sunshine at these factors. The remainder of the clock face is only a mesmerizing mixture of coloration and lightweight.
The important thing part on this construct is a BTF-LIGHTING LED circle factor. It has a number of concentric rings of WS2812B individually addressable RGB LEDs (for a complete of 241 pixels) on one PCB. A NodeMCU ESP8266 growth board controls the LEDs. That {hardware} sits within a 3D-printed enclosure with a diffuser cowl product of 3mm semi-translucent acrylic. That does an ideal job of diffusing the sunshine, so the clock face has a pleasant, uniform glow as an alternative of particular person factors of sunshine from the LEDs.
Pingo’s code features a person interface self-hosted by the ESP8266. Customers can entry that interface with their smartphone or pc. It lets them swap between completely different coloration/results modes, modify the brightness, and set an alarm. Pingo routinely updates the time by means of the community connection.
If you need a clock overflowing with model and do not care if anybody else can use it to determine the time, then Pingo is likely to be the perfect undertaking for you.
