I found some LED filaments on Ali Express and wanted to make something with them. A problem with not wearing glasses in bed is that I often couldn’t see a bedside clock, so decided to use them to build a clock with digits big enough to see without my glasses.
There’s and ESP32 C3 at the core, an LED driver and ambient light sensor. The ALS is positioned behind the display so there isn’t too much feedback and makes it both daylight visible and a low glow at night. The ESP uses an NTP server for time sync and auto daylight saving adjustment.
I 3D printed some press-fit surrounds for the digits and laser cut some LED diffuser acrylic to diffuse the LED filaments into more readable digits.
Fred Temperton 