Oh, life, you and your ways...
When I saw the announcement for this challenge, I thought it would be the best opportuity to bring an old project idea to life, and so I wrote my application, and entered the selection process; when I was selected as one of the official applicants, I got really excited and started preparing for it, but I didn't expect a different challenge to present itself and take over everything!
Back in 2024 I experienced a sudden vision change, where halos started appearing around lights, even faint ones, and my photophobia, which was already annoying, became much worse. A visit to the doctor resulted in them sending me to the ER and me having an MRI brain scan done (which thankfully came out normal) and then being sent to all the eye exams. For most of 2025, as this was being studied, the exams came out normal, but then, around october I had an electroretinogram done, and that one didn't look good. With that, and being sent to genetic testing for vision related pathologies, and that some form of cone-rod distrophy became what they were (and still are) looking for, and what i could find about that was just no good, and everything became overwhelming, and working on a project centered around light felt icky at best, knowing i would be working on somehing i could possibly not enjoy, yeah, I removed myself completely from this, and basically put my life on pause while i dealt with all that.
My vision hasn't worsened, at least not significantly, since october 2024, and now, seeing things more calmly, and also, good news! genetic test came out negative for anything known related to vision pathologies, I think it's time to resume this project as well as to take on some others.
So! what is this project going to be about?
I have a really old computer keyboard which doesn't have backlit keys, so keyboarding in the dark is a bit cumbersome, especially when i need to use characters which aren't in my daily repertoire so they're also not in my muscle memory (also, darkness isn't great for dealing with typos), so I wanted to make a keyboard light. Another minor inconvenience I come across often is not having a visible clock all the time, and when I'm playing a full screen game, and for some reason I want to quickly know what time it is, alt-tabbing then hovering the cursor at the bottom of the screen to make the task bar come up to see the time isn't the most convenient thing, so I also wanted to make the keyboard light into a clock.
My idea is to make a binary clock (trade one minor inconvenience for another, isn't that the maker way?) with the keyboard light, which at the press of a button (maybe a mouse button so it's always there?) displays the time, and then goes back to its keyboard light duties after a short period.
How will it work?
To count to 24 in binary we need at least 5 bits, so that makes the number of light zones easy to figure out: 5. But, that would only allow for hour representation, there would be no granularity, so I thought to represent 5 minute intervals with color, so that needs 12 colors, 12 colors which have to be distinct enough from each other to quickly tell qhich 5 minute interval they are in. Let's get an idea of how it would work:
Let's say it's 17:45, so, 17 in binary is 10001:
and the 45? let's make it blue for now:
This example made me think of even more granularity, to be able to have a resolution of 1 minute by having the hour be solid white, the minute being color, but also blinking, and also using the 5 light areas to represent the minutes within the 12 chunks of 5 minutes that the different colors allow.
Let's consider 17:47 now:
The LSB is on the right, so we have 17 from the white lights, we see a blue light so we know we're in the 17:45 to 17:49 region, and we see the blue in the third light area, so we know it's 17:47. But how do we know there isn't a white light hiding under the blue one? The minute indicator will blink, so it will be on, like above, for one second, and off, like below, for another second:
Is reading this clock more complicated than alt-tabbing then hovering over the task bar? maybe. Is it more fun? definitely!
So, with no time left in the challenge's clock, posting this preamble is a way to motivate myself to continue working on this project, and keep you all updated!
