A word clock doesn’t show the time — it says it, lighting “IT IS TEN MINUTES PAST SEVEN” out of a grid of letters. This one puts 132 addressable LEDs behind a 3D-printed frame and drives them with a from-scratch firmware rewrite of a classic open-source design, rebuilt for the ESP32-S3.
The modernization is everything around the clock. It joins your Wi-Fi from a phone via a captive portal, syncs over NTP with automatic daylight-saving handling, and serves its own settings dashboard straight off the board — brightness, color modes, on-the-hour animations, even over-the-air firmware updates. No app, no cloud, nothing to subscribe to.
Under the hood it’s proper firmware: a fully non-blocking state machine with no delay() anywhere, and a per-frame power model that estimates the LED strip’s current draw and clamps brightness to a configurable budget, so it can never overload its supply. GPL-licensed on GitHub, with the wiring diagram and parts list to build your own.
