Nate Dickson Thinks...

I've had a Pimoroni Inky pHAT sitting around for a while while I tried to figure out how to make indexed graphics. If I'm honest, it's mostly been a solution in search of a problem.

I like the idea of a little e-ink display that can be a simple information source, but e-ink is slow...to...refresh... how slow?

So this screen was a bit difficult to use. I need something that doesn't update all that frequently.

And recently I remembered a cool clock I used to have that told the time in five minute increments. What if I just re-built that?

I decided I wanted to use a classy, fancy font, so I used the Renner* Jost font by Indestructible Type, a great foundry that makes nice fonts in classy styles.

I'm still calling this project the “Renner* Clock” unless someone comes after me, to honor Paul Renner, the creator of the Futura typeface, and because I'm lazy.

So I wrote the code...and the fun part of working on a clock is that it tells you exactly how much sleep you're losing to the project you're working on as you work on it.

I also had fun fitting graphics to the display; it's an indexed-color display, so you tell it that each pixel is one of 0,1,2 and those are mapped to white, black and red on the device. the aseprite software worked well for that.

So bottom line, after about five hours of tinkering I have a fun little word clock and I can start adding more backgrounds to make it a little classier...if I learn to draw, of course.

#100DaysToOffload 62/100