UNMOMENT - Ntp, Binary, Rgb CLOCK

This is my hardest to read attempt of a clock.

You need to know how a binary clock works and something about color-mixing lights.

I don't think that anyone can read it, while the secons are ON, so there is a button to deactivate the seconds.

Here is a short Video of it in action. It's hard to record colorful-light.

- >

Let's get started:

But, first, let me ask you, if you can vote for this in the invention - contest?

Step 1: Parts and Tools

Some Wood. Sounds easy, but can take some time.

Aluminium and a way to bend it.

WS2801 LED Strip with 3.1cm between each LED.

A piece of Acryl.

Some Wires, one Button and an idea to put this all together.

Step 2: Design and Construction

I've played around with an endless number of designs, until i stumbled upon a piece of firewood.

So the rest was build around it.

The Front Part is bend aluminium with 1mm holes in it. Those holes are filled with hot glue.

The wood is glued to a bigger part of wood. The bigger part is bolted from lower side.

The second part with the Wemos etc is glued on a piece of Acryl.

The Acryl gets holded bei another piece of aluminium. And that again is glued to the first part.

All Aluminium is 1mm thick. So it get's a floating look.

Step 3: Electronis

The Buttons are just sticked into the Acryl-Part. The legs are 5mm apart.

1mm holes and they fit perfectly.

The Light-Stripe is glued to the ground. It has a selfsticking film.

Wemos just glued to the acryl.

Step 4: Software and Soldering

The soldering part is quite easy.

Following the Code in this step, you need to solder:

One Button Pin to: D4

Data from WS2801: D6

CLK from WS2801: D7

V to 5V

Ground to Ground and the other leg of your button.

We will use the inner pullup-resistor.

You need this libraries:

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Adafruit_WS2801.h

SPI.h

Time.h

TimeLib.h

NtpClientLib.h

ESP8266WiFi.h

DNSServer.h

ESP8266WebServer.h

WiFiManager.h

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Step 5: First Start

The Wemos starts with the integrated wifimanager and gets into AP mode.

You need your smartphone and connect to the new WLAN-network "uNmOment". No password.

Now a website will open where you can enter your wlan settings of your own router.

Restart it ... and it will get the time over NTP.

If you are not living in europe, you need to edit line 50.

NTP.begin("es.pool.ntp.org", 1, true); // get time from NTP server pool.

If you have it still connected to your Arduino, you can see all debugoutputs on the serial monitor.

That helps a lot, if it doesn't work as expected.

Step 6: Using It

The clock starts with secons in ON-state. Colorful but not readable at all.

Push the button and the seconds will disappear. Press it again and the function will be reactivated.

BUT: you will have to wait one minute untill the seconds will come back.

I couldn't find a better way to do it. The code sleeps for 60 second.

If the code would still run while the seconds are OFF, the lights blinks every second.

Slightly, barely noticeable, but its anoying.

You can read it:

First light is 32. Second is 16 ... and so on.

So we have:

32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1

The hour is blue (and pink)

The minute is red (and pink)

So in the first picture we have this hour:

16 + 2 + 1 = 19

And this minute:

4 + 2 + 1 = 7

It is 19:07. As long as the seconds are OFF, it is just that easy.

If the seconds are ON, everything changes.

The seconds are green (and bright blue, and yellow, and white)

The minutes are red (and pink, and yellow, and white)

The hours are blue (and pink, and bright blue, and white)

Had a lot of fun from idea to finished clock.

Maybe some other nerds out there need this time-piece.