The aim of a clock is to indicate the time, clearly. However when you’ve adopted Hackaday for a while, you’ll know there are about 1,000,000 other ways of attaining this. [illusionmanager] added one more methodology in his Pingo Shade Clock, which, because the title suggests, makes use of colour as the principle indicator.

The clock’s face is split into three concentric round zones. The zone on the middle reveals the hours, whereas the outer ring signifies the minutes. Each change their colour such that they match the zone in between, which at all times reveals an entire rainbow, on the desired location. Within the image above for instance, the magenta interior circle matches the rainbow on the 10 o’clock place, whereas the yellow outer circle matches it at 10 minutes previous the hour, which means it’s at present 10:10.

The rainbow ring can also be shifting nevertheless, and by adjusting its rotation by means of time you may get some attention-grabbing results. [illusionmanager] programmed it in such a manner that the outer ring is at all times yellow in the course of the day, purple at night time, and crimson at dawn and sundown. The general brightness can also be adjusted to a day/night time schedule.

As advanced because the clock’s look could also be, inside it’s fairly a easy design. 9 concentric round LED strips are pushed by an ESP8266, which retrieves the time and dawn data by means of its WiFi connection. A bit of translucent white acrylic acts as a diffuser, whereas a 3D-printed enclosure holds every little thing collectively.

Encoding the time utilizing totally different colours of sunshine has been finished earlier than in varied other ways, and whereas we haven’t seen Pingo in actual life, we consider it ought to be considerably simpler to learn than most of these examples. It’d really type a pleasant complement to a latest analog LED ring clock.