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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/i-wanted-a-clock-that-never-needed-setting-things-escalated/ [arstechnica.com]

I wanted a clock that, annoyingly, didn’t seem to exist.
[...]
My perfect clock would be self-setting. It would offer auto-DST adjustment (or not, depending on how this bill fares [timeanddate.com]!). It would manage drift and always show the exact sub-second time. It would show that time on a red seven-segment display—not blue, not green, not yellow, and absolutely not white.
[...]
Battery-backed self-setting “atomic” clocks that get their updates via the cosmic ether [wikipedia.org] have been a thing for years and get me most of the way there, but damned if I could find one with a red seven-segment display that I liked (maybe someone else’s search kung-fu is better than mine?).
[...]
I thought to myself, “Wait a second. I’ve got a 3D printer. I’m, like, smart and stuff. Why not buy a seven-segment display and make my own clock?”

And so, standing on the shoulders of giants stacked up so high that I could practically touch the Moon, I did.
[...]
here’s the finished repo [github.com]. It contains my bill of materials [github.com] with prices and purchase locations, the software [github.com], and the 3D printer files [github.com]
[...]
a Pi gave me the security blanket of a Debian-based operating system, complete with Wi-Fi and NTP for the “the clock sets and updates itself” requirement, along with the usual Linux remote management routine I already know.

Picking a seven-segment display was easy: Adafruit makes awesome clock-face style LED displays [adafruit.com] with 1.2-inch high numerals, and it sells a kit [adafruit.com] that bundles the display I want with a “backpack” board containing the HT16K33 controller needed to drive the LEDs. I ordered three and ended up using all of them for testing, assembly, and figuring out how to solder.
[...]
I grabbed a baby’s-first-soldering-iron kit from Amazon and a roll of 60/40 solder. (I also had to buy a desktop magnifying lens, because as I found out when I got in there, these old eyes can’t focus up close like they once could.)
[...]
I distilled my software requirements down to a list:

• The clock host should be LAN-only and not accessible from the Internet
• The clock host should get its updates from a LAN-only apt mirror
• The clock host should get its NTP sync from a LAN-only NTP server
• The clock service should be a systemd service running unprivileged under a dedicated service account context
• The clock service should use the system time, so the host OS handles NTP and keeps us in sync with whatever DST is or isn’t doing
• The clock service should be able to turn the display on and off on a schedule so it’s off for most of the day when I’m not in the bedroom
• The clock service should also be able to brighten/dim its display on a schedule
• The clock service should have some way of being controlled via the CLI for terminal connections, too
• The display should be controllable via HomeKit, because I live in iOS-land
• The clock service and its dependencies should be installable via a single script
• Once installed, everything should be deployable so I can push updates if needed rather than having to log in and reinstall

[...]
But I started to worry when I looked up examples of how to communicate with the clock display via I2C. My much-atrophied Python muscles were already straining and would absolutely not be able to meet this challenge. This was the point where the project stopped feeling fun and started feeling impossibly hard.

So I shoved the coding tasks off onto an LLM.
[...]
Claude Code proved more than capable enough to tackle this project—first with Opus 4.8 and then later with the new fancy Fable model, whose world-ending powers [arstechnica.com] I harnessed and used on what is probably in truth an intern-level coding project.
[...]
I know this admission may be anathema to many among the Ars commentariat, but it is what it is—without the LLM, I wouldn’t have finished the project. I would have gotten annoyed, angry, or just tired of endlessly reading StackOverflow posts criticizing what I’m trying to do for being dumb and wrong.
[...]
On the physical side, I did indeed find a Creative Commons-licensed 3D-printable enclosure [printables.com] designed around the same Adafruit display I was using, but it wasn’t quite right.

Modifying the model meant doing battle with the absurdly user-hostile nightmare that is Autodesk Fusion, so I girded my loins and dove in—and hit another wall. Parametric modeling, especially when weighted down with decades of AutoCAD’s stupid UI/UX choices, was even harder than programming.
[...]
Fusion now ships with an MCP server [autodesk.com], so I could potentially let an LLM remote control the application and make the modifications for me.
[...]
I first tried my modifications with a quantized version of Qwen 3.6-35B (this one, specifically [huggingface.co])
[...]
was almost up to the task, making one of my changes but flubbing the other; I fell back on Claude Code and Fable to handle most of the model adjustments.
[...]
Emboldened by not screwing up the soldering too badly and now having a live display to mess with, I pressed on. The next thing to deal with was that while the Adafruit display is dimmable, even at minimum dimness, it still proved too bright for a dark bedroom.
[...]
I ended up pairing the NDF with some smoked acrylic
[...]
The next issue was iterating through all the model changes necessary to incorporate the acrylic and NDF into the clock case. I ended up (via LLM MCP magic) splitting the existing design into a few more separate pieces and cutting out a pocket for the acrylic face; I also had the LLM add guide pins and holes for each piece.
[...]
The end result exactly matched my expectations—the best criterion for success that I can think of. With an LLM providing the heavy code lifting and the CAD work, I think I spent more time waiting on supplies to arrive than on anything else—something attributable to my lack of planning and the ease of next-day delivery.
[...]
this was a great hobby project. I got to solder stuff, which was both harder and easier than I expected. I used miles of filament while printing and re-printing different iterations of the case. And I learned a ton.

I spent… well, a lot more money than I intended to, between a couple of false starts, the soldering iron and kit, and extra supplies for redundancy and do-overs. And I could have compromised and gotten a regular clock that does most of what I want. But the experience was fun, and the joy of having exactly what I want is priceless.

Original Submission