Pingo Displays the Time as Color

If you actually need to know the time, you'll glance at your smartwatch, phone, or one of the several digital clocks scattered throughout any given location. That is practical and sensible, but also kind of boring. When knowing the time is less important than having an experience, you have an opportunity to get creative with your clock design. Illusionmanager certainly exercised that right when they built the Pingo clock, which displays the time as color.

Pingo doesn't have physical hands or a digital readout. At first glance, it just looks like a glowing disc of colorful diffuse light. It is a really, really attractive design that should please all eyes, but it isn't immediately obvious how one can decipher the time. If you look closely, however, you'll see that there are indicators around the perimeter that represent the hour and minute hands of an analog clock. The particular look depends on the effect mode that you have Pingo set to, but there will be some sort of solid blotch of color or absence of light at those points. The rest of the clock face is just a mesmerizing mix of color and light.

The key component in this build is a BTF-LIGHTING LED circle thing. It has several concentric rings of WS2812B individually addressable RGB LEDs (for a total of 241 pixels) on one PCB. A NodeMCU ESP8266 development board controls the LEDs. That hardware sits inside of a 3D-printed enclosure with a diffuser cover made of 3mm semi-translucent acrylic. That does a great job of diffusing the light, so the clock face has a nice, uniform glow instead of individual points of light from the LEDs.

Pingo's code includes a user interface self-hosted by the ESP8266. Users can access that interface with their smartphone or computer. It lets them swap between different color/effects modes, adjust the brightness, and set an alarm. Pingo automatically updates the time through the network connection.

If you want a clock overflowing with style and don't care if anyone else can use it to figure out the time, then Pingo might be the ideal project for you.