I’ve finally found the time to use the ws2811’s to build a clock. The core of the clock is the Gina board that we designed for the cappuccino PID controller. As a side rant, I really am starting to hate the state of the software industry, everything is so damn bloated these days, and just doesn’t work. It seems that getting something out the door take precedence over quality. Maybe that’s forgivable for open source S/W. I don’t know. Anyway I spent about three days getting eclipse, avr-gcc and git all playing nicely on osx, and there is still a pile of stuff broken. My old dev environment was rock solid but didn’t have git integration. Anyway it took about an hour and a half to get the clock code running to the state that you see here. At least my S/W infrastructure works. The clock is reading from the SD card, playing audio, updating the LEDs and updating the LCD all at the same time. RTOSs are just a blast when you get everything working.

Enough nattering, here are a few photos and videos. The build was fun, using the CNC. The result is a little goofy since the acrylic tends to take the colors from the leds and just scatter the light to combine the colors, so this is really fun to look at but a pain to use to actually tell the time with. I guess thats what the LCD is for. It was originally intended to show the date.