Adding a Touchscreen Interface to a Broken Clock

Today, if you want to know the time, you most likely look at your phone. Dedicated clocks are certainly still available, but if you have a small, inexpensive model, like the one shown in the Volos Projects video below, you may find that it stops working at some point. The conventional “solution” may be to throw it away and get another one, but VP decided to instead replace the standard face and movement internals with a Waveshare 1.46” 412x412 round touch display.

Mechanically, there’s not a whole lot to this build. VP simply disassembled the clock and replaced the guts with the Waveshare unit. Construction foam holds the new electronics in place, and a little battery provides power. One could see using hot glue or some sort of epoxy as a more permanent solution to secure everything. However, the nice thing here is that the Waveshare display's form factor just kind of fits in the clock body, even if it’s a little small.

The device’s touchscreen interface allows VP to set the time, date, and screen brightness, and there’s a battery display that shows when it’s time to plug it in. It looks quite brilliant in the video, and if you’d like to program something similar yourself, code and user interface info are available in the video description. Of course, the Waveshare board includes lots more functionality, such as Wi-Fi, a microphone and speaker, GPIO pins, and more, so there are all kinds of further possibilities for what you could do with this type of clock hack!