BrainJar's Beginner-Friendly 3D-Printed Ring Clock Includes Easy Daylight Savings Switching
Flipping from summer to winter time? Just hit the switch and this desk clock does the rest.
Pseudonymous educator and maker "BrainJar" has published designs and source code for a 3D-printable clock built around a 12-LED RGB ring board — and featuring a physical switch to enable daylight savings time.
"Playing around with a 12 RGB LED ring and a Raspberry Pi Pico it occurred to me," BrainJar writes by way of introduction to the project: "how could I make this into a clock? The LEDs light up different colors to show the hour and minute hand: the hour hand is a blue LED; the minute hand cycles from red to green as each minute passes; if the hour and minute hand take up the same space then the LED again cycles through a series of colors."
12 LEDs are ideal for displaying the hours on an analog clock face, though less-so for minutes: while there are 12 hours per half-day, there are 60 minutes in an hour meaning the minute "hand" has a five-minute resolution — good enough for making sure you're not too badly late to an appointment. The ring is housed in a 3D-printed torus, the front of which acts as a diffuser, while the rest of the electronics are found in a black box underneath.
In addition to the Raspberry Pi Pico, the build includes a Waveshare real-time clock (RTC) module with battery backup to keep time even if power is disconnected, a USB Type-C connector for power, and — unusually — a physical switch that allows the clock to flip between standard and daylight savings modes without needing to be reset.
BrainJar has published a full build guide on Instructables, with 3D print files on MakerWorld under the reciprocal MakerWorld Exclusive License and source code on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.