Digital E-ink Clock

I think this is it!! I have spent the last few hours connecting everything and organising it inside the housing. Additionally, finished up the code to set an alarm and replaced the quote with the weather forecast. A little less inspiring (especially with the next few days just raining) but more useful 🙃. It really has been an incredible project. It’s strange, before, I never really considered that building something like this was an option, if you know what I mean. Like just buying parts and fitting them together and it all working is really magical. For this final dev vlog, here is the final part list all together:

• ESP32 dev board
• RGB addressable light strip
• 3mm LED light in orange
• 3.7-inch e-ink display
• two buttons
  -one Potentiometer
• One passive buzzer
  -a lot of 3d printing filament (PLA and PETG transparent)
• usb cable

It may sound quite annoying, but I am surprisingly glad of how often I failed (mind you, not at the time). I redesigned the outer body of the clock 3 times (plus printing it three times, don’t even want to know how much filament I used up), moved up from an Arduino Uno to an ESP32 as the Uno just didn’t have enough RAM, and redesigned how the buttons would work 4 times. At the time, this was very disheartening, but when I now look at my first draft and imagine this would be the final result, I’m so glad it isn’t.

Finally have everything wired up and working. Well that is except the buttons, they just refuse to work as I want them to. But at least the alarm should be working and it is an alarm clock after all (just no way of stopping it right now). Will experiment more and see what I can do

It’s coming together, I have just added the button to control the light bar and printed the last elements to hold up the button from the inside. This was a little bit of a challenge working out how the button can be
pressed down and click but not fall out or move except down. Well it worked out, now the next step is the alarm function.

The rest of the components arrived (yay), so I got to work connecting the screen to the esp32 board and the LED light strip. It’s working surprisingly well, with the correct time displaying and the LED light turning on. I used Claude to write the code for the screen as I really only know the web languages (e.g. html, css and JS). With actually having the screen I was able to measure it and make some changes to my 3d model that I have just sent to my printer. Really excited to see how it comes out.

Making changes to the box, I really wanted to add an image of the clock itself so I made this mockup. Let me know what you think.

The packaging is going well. I wanted to show that the clock has an RGB light. So I decided to add a rainbow of colour to the top left. I also added more details and icons to fill the space. It still needs a lot of work, but is coming together.

I’m still waiting on the parts for the clock, but in the meantime, I thought it would be a good idea to think about some packaging. I just love the idea of a retro box designed to fit the whole retro aesthetic of the clock itself. I made a start on the actual box and created a mood board. This is still a very early draft, but I think the key is in adding a lot of very small and fine details.

Just a small update. I have modeled the backplate for the clock and finished preparing it for printing. Unfortunately, I now have to wait until the parts I need arrive so I can start the assembly (esp32 dev board and a e-ink screen). They should be here this week so fingers crossed I can actually see if this works.

I’m making progress, and creating the extras for the clock. For example the panels below the buttons that will hold them up. I have a light bar at the front of the model and have been experimenting with different ways to attach it to the actual body, first I just thought glue. But I wanted to make it a little more secure so I added some overhangs that should help lock it in place. As you can see the icons for the buttons are also finished; a circle for the snooze button to represent a clock and three lines on the light button to represent rays of light.

Started working on the clock buttons and refining the clock body.

I really want to build a digital alarm clock with an e-ink display (like you would find in a Kindle). It is very much retro style as I think that would look really good. I have started to build a design in TinkerCad to 3d print. Here is just the first draft.