I’ve been planning to build a Pingo clock for quite some time. Finally having some time available between projects I had most components on hand. With the exception for the bigger LED rings. And I also wanted to have the clock run on Circuitpython instead of Arduino. So I designed a smaller one, with only 7 led rings instead of 9. This also allowed me to print more parts, for example the diffusion screen is printed as well as a custom USB-c charging backplate. I’ve also switched to a Raspberry Pi Pico W so I can use Circuitpython to automatically grab the time with NTP (just like the original!).

Here are a couple of photos:

And the circuitpython code can be found on Github. I decided to drop a lot of functionality as it’s easy to set daylight savings time once a year. And I don’t want the overhead of an entire webserver for that. A clock should be a simple device, hah! The clock is now residing on the top of a cabinet in our main room, giving small hints of the current time while not being in your face… In the future I might want to tinker around with the brightness during evening hours… or maybe adjust it with an LDR… Oh soo many ideas, so little time. That’s it for now!