My LED circle clock got picked up by Hackaday — always a nice surprise to find your project featured there.
The idea started when I found a 241-LED ring on AliExpress — a circular PCB with individually addressable RGB LEDs. It struck me immediately as a perfect analog clock face. The rings are designed to be separated but it is easy enough to wire them together into one continuous circle of pixels.
How it works
Each hand of the clock is a different color. Because the LEDs are discrete points spaced around the circle, I added antialiasing to make the hands look smoother — the brightness of neighboring LEDs is blended based on the exact angle, so the hands don’t just jump from pixel to pixel.
The second hand was the trickiest part to get right. Rather than advancing one LED per second, it uses the milliseconds as a fractional offset, so it rotates continuously and smoothly. An ESP8266 runs the show, driving the LEDs and syncing the time from an NTP server so it is always accurate.
To keep things fun, the clock occasionally breaks into a short animation — a Pac-man running around the ring, or a radar scan sweeping through the LEDs.
Build your own
All files are on GitHub, including the Blender models for the 3D-printed case. The LED hardware is easy to find: search for 241 LED ring on AliExpress.
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