r2N9het grahamvinyl/Imgur

There are plenty of ways to read a clock besides evaluating the moving hands and looking at a standard digital display. For some people, a clock can be a tangled trail of LEDs, letters, and code.

Imgur user grahamvinyl recently posted a photo album with his take on a Word Clock, a digital clock that tells you the time with words. Grahamvinyl cut out the surface of the clock from an acoustic guitar's back and sides and strung together individually programmable rainbow-colored LEDs to make the clock.


After much laser cutting, carving, coding, and organizing, the word clock was ready.

There's a matrix of letters on the clock, and most words can be spelled out horizontally. Numbers that take longer to spell out, like "fifteen" are rendered as "quarter past," and the clock also counts 2 minutes before and after :15 as quarter past.

The clock also has a button that allows it to show the numerical time — if you look from far away, the lit up letters create the shapes of numbers. The hours show up dimmer, and the minutes brighter.

Push it again, and it shows you the numerical date in the same way. It even knows when your birthday is (if you tell it), and can flash "Happy Birthday" on the board.

Grahamvinyl used an Arduino controller to power the board, and hooked up a USB connection to the clock to make it more easily programmable. The code is available here on Github, if you want to make your own. You can also check out more photos below.