Product idea taking shape...my 'night clock' project uses an ambient light + proximity sensor (APDS-9930) to set the brightness of the LED matrix. At night it goes totally black until you bring your hand near it and then it will show you the time without lighting up the room. Low cost components (<$3 total including PCB). Do you sleep in a dark room and avoid light pollution? Interested?
@fast_code_r_us@jpm that’s a really cool concept, and also super useful for a theatre to have an actually dark clock - I wonder if we could modify the code to take and display time stamps
@FallenRedNinja@fast_code_r_us appears to have a CH32V003 onboard controlling the show, so should be pretty hackable to display whatever numbers at any frequency you need
@jpm@FallenRedNinja Agree - if you look closely you can see pairs of LEDs in each segment. Red + green in the opposite polarity. A total of 62 discrete 0603 LEDs are there (hand placed).
@jpm@FallenRedNinja This is an early POC version that may change radically when I'm done with it. I wanted to test the proximity sensor idea on members of my family (we all sleep in totally blackened rooms). I also had the idea of green/yellow/red colors to indicate your 'busy' state on your desk (to other observers). There's another pair of LEDs on the back to face oncoming people and let them know not to disturb you. The DS3231+APDS9930 work exactly as I had hoped. Now to the aesthetics...
@fast_code_r_us light levels are so logarithmic – I like as dark a room as possible and find brightness controls usually don't have enough range at the low end.
When you're half asleep the effort to move your hand to check time feels huge. We have a projection clock turned as low as it'll go. It projects on the ceiling but aimed out of direct view and that works pretty well. Just a bit of a head tip required.
@ottaross I'm generating super 'thin' PWM that can go darker than most displays offer. I have plenty of dim clocks that I can leave running during the night, but my wife and I don't want the time visible unless we ask for it. The scenario (especially in winter) is that you've been woken up, it's dark and you need to know if it's 4:00 or closer to 7:00AM to try to sleep more or get up already.
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