This Colorful Word Clock Announces Holidays and Birthdays
Reddit hiro24 designed and built this colorful word clock that announces holidays and birthdays, in addition to the time and date.
Word clocks display the time as written sentences. Instead of the clock showing the time like "3:19," a word clock will show "the time is now nineteen minutes past three in the afternoon." Some, like the one we're showcasing here, also add the date with additional words at the end, like: "today's date is Jan the 30th." But that capability is old news and such word clocks have existed for decades. To up the ante, Redditor hiro24 also gave his colorful word clock the ability to announce holidays and birthdays.
Like other word clocks, this model contains a "display" made up of many letters and words cut out of an opaque panel, through which light shines. The clock illuminates whichever words apply at the current time. Some models get clever and combine multiple words so that they share letters, in order to reduce the required space and complexity. But this implementation keeps things simple and has every word written out, one after the other, across the display.
The words are illuminated by a Waveshare 64x32 pixel RGB LED matrix housed in a 3D-printed enclosure. That provides a total of 2,048 LEDs, each of which can light up a single letter. They can be set to any color and it seems that hiro24 used that capability to help differentiate between nearby words. The display was designed for control like a standard LED matrix, with the controller selecting the row and column for a specific pixel. It then adds six pins to set the RGB value (two pins for each color channel).
To control the LED matrix, hiro24 used a Raspberry Pi single-board computer. They could have used a microcontroller development board, like an Arduino, but chose the Raspberry Pi for two reasons: it can keep time without any additional hardware and it can access the internet and/or a local database. The latter functionality let hiro24 set it up so that it knows if the current date corresponds to an event like a birthday or a holiday. Additional words on the display facilitate those announcements. It can, for example, display the words "today is Martin's birthday."
That birthday and holiday customization makes this word clock stand out, because there isn't any way to create such a clock that would apply to general consumers.