But on the other hand... gosh, this was about the simplest software engineering challenge imaginable (toggle some I/O pins) and the simplest design task imaginable (make a featureless rectangular box). And the author - a technologist! - isn't just saying "I wanted to try out some new tech". They're saying "this was too hard, I needed help from an LLM" ("would absolutely not be able to meet this challenge", "hit another wall").

And that... I mean, I just don't know what to make of this. Were we always like this? Are LLMs making us like this? Is it good? Is it bad?... and don't give me the calculator analogy...

Why is it so dang impossible to find a not trash simple LED clock that's 'large print', 'the right color', and not annoyingly too bright?

A deluxe model might include a day of the week bar or dot and a month / day in month number (smaller than the time, mostly people care about the time)

There’s a time zone setting offset slider and a DST slider. I basically touch it twice a year, maybe another if I move time zones. I’ve only had to touch it for DST (never switched time zones). Takes me conservatively 10 seconds to find and flip, so it’s taken me 460 seconds or a little under 8 minutes in the past 23 years to do time adjustments.

While these efforts are definitely fun hobby projects, there are cheap reliable solutions out there with minimal intervention that consume the NIST radio signal for time.

Just for anyone interested who wasn’t aware there’s some “old school” time broadcast solutions out there too besides NTP: https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-di...

I have three La Crosse clocks that run off the NIST time signal out of Boulder, CO, and need their AA battery replaced maybe once a year. The real challenge is running such a thing on a small battery for a year.

I once made a small clock that displayed "A LITTLE AFTER SIX" and such, changing its text every five minutes. Needed a power connection, though.

No need for me to reinvent the wheel, works a treat mounted above my monitor

Ok, so instead of bumping your clock +- one hour twice a year you preferred distro upgrades?

Also: I reckon the closest best-value watch alternative that ticks most(?) of the author's boxes is the Casio GW-M5610-1ER, so long as you are inside a radio-controlled time area.

I found this with ~5 minutes of searching. I think it meets your critera: https://www.amazon.com/Sharp-Digital-Alarm-AccuSet-Automatic...

(Regardless, cool project! I think yours still looks better than this one)