The Synesthetic Clock Is a Synesthesia-Style Analog Timepiece
Markus Opitz's ESP32-based clock features "hands" that change color and shape with the progression of time.
According to Markus Opitz, creator of the Synesthetic Clock, a person with synesthesia may associate certain letters and numbers with certain colors. While a strange concept to most, one might also consider that the color of sunlight subtly changes throughout the day, so why not use this to represent the passage of time on a clock?
For his unique timepiece, Opitz uses a pair of circular TFT displays to show minutes and hours as Pac-Man-like “hands,” in colors that correspond to their positions.
By default, hours are shown on the left display in blue for AM and red for PM. The minute representation on the right changes from blue to green, to yellow, and finally red as the hour progresses. Although this generally follows the natural daylight progression pattern of cool in the morning, warm in the evening, one could modify the Arduino code included in the project write-up to suit your individual preferences.
The clock runs on an ESP32 dev board, which controls the two GC9A01 round displays and gets the time from a real-time clock (RTC) module. One could see the ESP32 also being employed to pull time wirelessly via NTP, though with the current setup one doesn’t have to be near a Wi-Fi network or worry about setting that up properly.
As shown in the video below, Opitz crafted a beautifully understated enclosure for the Synesthetic Clock out of a slab of oak. After it was cut, drilled, routed, chiseled, and finished, it now conceals the electronics inside while looking like something that could fit in nicely on a shelf or desk.