Having finally got reliable access to a laser cutter, this was the first thing I wanted to make.

I didn't want a clock that was a 10 x 10 grid with words that were split and made up of letters from different words. The kind of thing I was looking to avoid was "It's twel ve O'Clock", because the word "twelve" is made from the letters "tweleven". That's good and all to save LED's, but It's not for me. I didn't want equal columns and rows, so I designed a nice little mask in Inkscape and got it cut. It came out great and I was on a roll.

Shortly after I realised that it was going to be difficult to stop light bleed between the letters. I had decided to share some of the letters for words, like "TWONE" and "THREEIGHT", but now realised I had to make sure the light bleed wouldn't happen. I needed more room between the letters and a way to isolate the light to each one.

Back to the drawing board I came up with a prototype few letters (10 to be exact), of a selection of shapes. I also cut a baseboard with 5mm square for the WS2812 leds (yeah, I want it to be nice and colourful!) and 8 identical pieces of cutouts slightly larger than the letters. All of this was cut from 3mm laser ply.

The prototype worded perfectly and I worked out my layout for maximum 'WTF' moments and ordered some WS2812's from China and waited.....

When they arrived I made sure they fit the cut out in the base board. I'm pleased I waited, as the new LEDs seem to have an extra capacitor on the board, so the cut out needed to be a bit bigger than the original test layout.

Anyhow, off I trotted to the laser cutter place and cut out the parts. Wow, 6mm ply takes a *lot* longer to cut that 3mm stuff. I stacked the bits on top of one another and shown a LED through it. No light bleed and a perfectly formed letter H by using my small Pimoroni Ninja diffuser plastic lid. Great, now I just need an A4 sheet of the stuff.

I contacted Pimoroni and asked them what it was and where could I get an A4 sheet from. A few days later, I got a more than helpful reply from them stating exactly the colour and material type. They said they didn't sell it in A4 size, but sent me a link to an ebay shop that did. Strangely enough, I had seen this in my searches, but thought it looked a bit light to be the same stuff. Armed with this info from the guys at Pimoroni, I bought an A4 sheet from ebay for 6 quid. It arrived, with the usual protective film on it and I gave it a shot. Wow. Perfect. Thanks Pimoroni. You've got a customer for life now!!

I assembled the LEDs together as shown in the photographs and started out on the code. I'd never user Python before, so I thought I would give that a try. I found that i really liked the way it *forced* you to layout the code in the very same way, that I prefer to layout my normal C++, PowerShell, Javascript etc. (note, I'm not a developer, but I enjoy dabbling....). IT was easy to learn and found a lot of resources to help. I used the Neopixel libraries from Adafruit to drive the LEDs.

During a shopping trip to Ikea, I saw an A4 photo frame that looked depp enough to put it all in. As it turned out, it is not quite deep enough, so the back is currently held on by tape. I wil lget around to something better though... maybe....

I wanted to make sure that I could have different effects modes available, so I started to think how I could manage that. I wanted a rainbow effect, a simple single colour, maybe a few transitions etc. I alos wanted to be able to change these at will without stopping or recompliing the code. For this reason, I decide to put all the setting into a MySQL DB and have the code read from that.

While working on the code, I decided that it would be nice to be able to change these from my phone (well, why not), so I decided try a PHP website. Not used that before, so, again, I was starting from scratch.