Episode 482: Gigantic 3D Printed 7 Segment Display Clock

an office would be a great place for a clock like this. Can your colleagues code? Have a hacking competition to change the time to home time!

Starting on a project is sometimes the most difficult part!

Thanks Dave. I saw John's video after mine, he's such a pro! Great ideas for getting the diffusion right.

Uau ! That's a nice project !  Such a huge clock ! I wander if my office colleagues  would love to have something like that !

Video on YouTube demonstrating the effect of distance vs diffusion here:

https://youtu.be/WUU8AQsf2Zw?t=156

(skip to 02:30 to see the test stand)

Yay! More clocks!

I'm also on board with the 5-LED-per-segment group. Overall, though, it looks great--especially on the lab wall!

I will, but I am afraid it will take more than a few months, because I still work on the sensor part (usually only one or two evenings in a week). I would like to share the sensor part first, but I still haven't figured out how to present my findings over the last 9 months of indoor measurements.

I also realized I still have a bag of 60 yellow LEDs and have a temptation to arrange them in a ring as minutes and add 12 red/green for hours. This could probably work on one of the Nucleo-144 boards even without a set of shift registers.

John Park demonstrates a method for getting good diffusion with large 7-segment displays here:

Assemble Panels | Ninja Timer: Giant 7-Segment Display | Adafruit Learning System

May be of interest / worth giving it a try.

Thanks David. Your clock sound really useful, I hope you share it as you make it.

I like the project, lorrainbow ! Very colorful, like your workshop I am thinking of building something similar, I've  always liked big numbers which are easy to read from across the room. I haven't seen any ready made, but these are much better and customizable.

I would also vote for 5 LEDs instead of 3 in each segment.

You also asked for other uses - my plan is to have 4 - 6 numbers and dots (double dot) between some of them, so they could generally display numbers with a few digits and decimal places. Then it could display various things from my sensor (meteo-like) station and be variable using colours. Different colour can mean a different quantity being displayed or just colour formatting similar in Excel.

For example

• outside temperature: negative temperature in blue, positive red (or even finer scale with more colours clearly signaling what to put on when going outside)
• humidity: red for less than 30 % rH, green for 30 - 60 % rH and blue for more than 60 % to signal need of ventilation
• volatile organic compounds, particles in the air, CO2 etc.
• or any other important number like bank account balance, exchange rate, newest version number of a favourite (or personal) project etc. (These days I also tend to watch a count of people being ill.)

Also, If the space between numbers is the same as space between the vertical lines of a single digit, the display can also be used as a horizontal bar graph.