Paragon Project: Pico Clock
Looking to build yourself a clock for your desk? This is a super stylish clock made with a Raspberry Pi Pico. It can also serve as a sleek alarm clock for your nightstand.
Posted on Reddit by EnviousMedia and on GitHub here, they’ve called it Env-OpenClock.
They’ve managed to put it together using inexpensive hardware. The best part is that this clock is unbelievably simple to put together!
Hardware
The basic components are the Raspberry Pi Pico and eight LED dot matrix boards. But they’ve also added a DS3231 Real-Time Clock module, which is a super useful I2C real-time clock. It’s able to keep time really accurately.
Additionally, they’ve attached four buttons for setting the time and setting the alarm and a switch to adjust the clock for daylight savings time.
Finally, there’s a little buzzer, as you can see in the photo above, that serves as the alarm. You might want to experiment with the buzzer, because as they write on Reddit, “the buzzer on there is absurdly loud”.
With the current build, they have the clock plugged in, but you could of course hook it up to a battery using a Lipo Shim for the Pico.
And although they’ve obviously made it with a customized printed circuit board, you could definitely do this without one!
Software
On their GitHub, they’ve been kind enough to share the firmware, which is mostly written in C and C++, for the clock.
So all you need to do is attach all the components and then flash the firmware onto the Pico. Could this get any easier?
On the Reddit page, someone commented that the clock looks like it came from the Matrix movies. With these green LED dot matrix boards, it definitely has Matrix vibes.
Of course, you can buy these LED dot matrix boards in all sorts of colors, changing the aesthetics of the clock to suit your desires!
Conclusion
So there you have it, the Pico Clock!
If you’re interested in checking out some other projects that tell time, we’ve got you covered:
You can also see more Paragon Projects of all varieties in this series by clicking here.
With such a straightforward project, I’m always tempted to deck it out by adding all sorts of extra features. You know, I like to make things more complicated than they need to be.
How would you deck out your Pico Clock?