WordClock/ Wortuhr/ QlockTwo

Instructions

The letter field is a matrix of 11x10 letters. In addition, there is a small dot in each corner to indicate the minutes. The text for the time is accurate to 5 minutes: 2:00 would mean: "IT IS 2 O'CLOCK" - or in my example in Swiss German: "ES ISCH ZWOI". The dots in the corners indicate the minutes 1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 22, 23, 24, etc. 2:02 would mean "IT IS 2 O'CLOCK" and two of the four dots are lit. The time 2:34 would be "IT IS HALF PAST THREE" and all four corner LEDs light up. At 2:35, the corner LEDs go out and the letters "IT IS TWENTYFIVE TO THREE" light up. You will find an Inkscape file with different layers. This should make it easier for you to adjust and align the design of the clock face yourself. The only important thing is that the clock face has 11 columns and 10 rows. Front side (letter side) First, the clock face is milled into the large wooden plate. Use the smallest possible router bit so that the edges look nice. It is important that there is always enough shaper tape in the viewing area of the origin and that you start routing from one direction. You will mill into the shaper tape and then Shaper will not be able to orientate itself. Therefore it is important that you mill from the bottom to the top. The letters should be cut 5mm deep as a pocket. When everything is milled, the pockets are blown out cleanly and filled with clear epoxy. You may have to fill this with epoxy in two passes. I put the epoxy resin in a disposable syringe, the needle of the syringe is very good for dosing. It is important that the epoxy is mixed and filled into the pockets without bubbles if possible. Backside: There are two groups of pockets on the back. The first group: Horizontal pockets in which the LED strip is guided. The pockets are 10mm wide and as long as an 11-LED sized segment of the strip. In addition, there is one LED segment in each corner for the corner LEDs and a 3 LED segment for the logo. These pockets have to be milled first in any case. The milling is 5mm deep. After milling, you will probably have to apply more shaper tape, because you have certainly milled into the tape. Rescan the work surface and start from the bottom. Start with the corner LEDs. First cut out all four, then continue from the bottom. At the bottom left and right are two large pockets where you can put the electronics. At the bottom in the middle is a larger pocket for the logo. Work from the bottom up so that you have enough shapertape in the field of vision of the origin. Make sure each row is completely routed before routing the new row. The pockets must be 37 or better 38 mm deep, so that you can always get to the epoxy resin layer and expose the epoxy resin. This should not be a problem if you have milled the letters 5mm deep. Take your time. I made the pockets so that you can mill the pockets quite easily with the Helix function or the AutoPass function. Finally, I would mill a 2-3 mm pocket over all the letters with a face milling unit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RyESlx2ivQ : Thanks @Jonas Winkler, I'm a big fan of yours!) so that you can leave a back panel in there and the clock is also neatly closed at the back. Now comes the electronics. You can find lots of examples from the Arduino world on the net, so it's quite easy to program the ESP8266. You have to connect the LED strips in such a way that you get one big chain. I started with the corner LEDs, LED 1 is bottom right, LED-2 top right, LED 3 top left, LED 4 bottom left, LED 5, 6 and 7 for the logo, then comes line 10 (LED 8 - 18), line 9 (LED 19-29) and so on. I have connected the ESP8266 to my WLAN and synchronise the time with an NPT server every hour via the NTP protocol. This eliminates the need for a real-time clock or those tedious implementations with radio clocks. Don't be angry if I don't publish the code; I don't think the manufacturer of the word clock is very happy. But there are lots of code examples on the internet.