There are no pictures inside it. No photographs, no video, no animation files. Every frame you see is worked out from scratch, about forty times a second, by a single chip smaller than a postage stamp.
A video loops. This does not. The fire is never the same fire twice, the fractal keeps finding new detail, and the pong match is genuinely being played.
The trick is doing the hard part once. The shape of the tunnel, the curve of the hills, the landscape you fly over — each is calculated a single time when the picture starts and stored as a table. After that, every frame is little more than looking numbers up and adding them together. That is the idea the demoscene was built on, and it is why a clock can do this on the power of a night light.
Forty years of computer graphics history, running on a desk. Every image below came out of the clock’s own framebuffer — nothing is a mock-up.
The Mandelbrot set, made famous by Benoît Mandelbrot at IBM in 1980. Infinitely detailed — keep magnifying and new structure keeps appearing. Your clock never reaches the bottom.
The oldest trick there is, from the space games of the early 1980s. Each streak is how far that star moved since the last frame.
A demoscene staple. The angle and depth of every pixel are worked out once; after that, flying down it is just adding a number.
Overlapping sine waves — the signature look of early-1990s PC demos, where the colours moved by cycling the palette rather than redrawing.
Heat rises from a hot row along the bottom and cools as it spreads. The cooling is random, which is why it flickers and never repeats.
Rotate and zoom. A flat pattern spun and scaled — an Amiga-era showpiece, because doing it smoothly was genuinely hard.
Layers sliding at different speeds to fake depth. Borrowed from arcade games of the early 1980s.
A Clifford attractor: two short equations fed back into themselves. The dot never repeats its path, yet always traces the same ghost.
Blobs that fuse when they come close. Invented by Jim Blinn in the early 1980s to draw molecules.
An actual wave simulation. Drops fall, ripples spread, reflect off the edges and interfere with each other.
Atari, 1972. Here it plays itself, on the water — every bounce sends a ring across the screen. The paddles miss on purpose.
Voxel terrain, as used by the 1992 flight game Comanche. The landscape is drawn by marching outward from the camera, one column at a time.
A cellular automaton: every cell copies its neighbour’s next state. Out of pure noise, structure organises itself.
Named for Mode 7, the 1990 Super Nintendo trick that tilted a flat image into a horizon — how Mario Kart faked 3D.
Some people want a clock. Some people want the picture, with the time out of the way. Put it large in the middle, or shrink it into any corner.
Join it to your Wi-Fi once, from your phone. It takes the time from the internet and keeps it. No buttons to hold at midnight, no drift.
Choose quiet hours and it dims, or turns the screen off entirely, then comes back in the morning. Daytime brightness is adjustable too.
Leave it to rotate through the effects at whatever interval you like, or hold it on the one you love.
New effects arrive over the internet. The clock fetches them, checks them and installs them — only when you ask it to. It carries no serial number or identifier, asks for nothing but a file, and the request is not logged.
A line of news scrolls across the part of the screen the clock leaves free. It checks every few minutes, sends nothing about you, and nothing is recorded. Switch it off and the clock contacts nothing at all.
The numerals are filled and outlined so they stay legible over even the busiest effect, without hiding the picture behind a box.
Set it per weekday from the same page. The outline flashes, so it works whether or not the buzzer is fitted.
| Screen | 1.9″ or 1.47″ colour IPS, 320×170 pixels |
|---|---|
| Brain | ESP32-S3 or ESP32-C6 — a microcontroller, not a computer. No operating system. |
| Frame rate | 29–65 frames per second depending on the effect, all computed live |
| Power | USB-C, about the draw of a night light |
| Network | 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, for the time and for updates. Works as a clock without it once set. |
| Setup | The clock raises its own Wi-Fi network and serves a page. No app, no account. |
Every screenshot on this page was read out of a clock’s framebuffer, at the panel’s real resolution, and is shown at twice size with its pixels intact. Nothing has been retouched or rendered elsewhere.
Two things reach the internet, both of them plain requests for a file, neither carrying anything about you or the clock.
| Headlines | Every few minutes while the news ticker is on. Switch the ticker off and this stops entirely. |
|---|---|
| Updates | Only when you tap Check for updates. Never on its own. |
| The time | From public time servers, a few times a day. |
There is no account, no app and no identifier. The server keeps no log of these requests. Nothing about what you do with the clock leaves it, because the clock does not know anything about you to begin with.