Sequino clock

It was inspired by a T-shirt worn by his daughter – sequins are tactile as well as shiny, and by stroking them one way or the other the wearer can flip them over to reveal the different-coloured underside. 

As you might expect, this wasn’t a simple build: the maker had difficulties with the relatively low-resolution display (the sequins are around 5mm in diameter, stitched 3mm apart, which restricts the minimum size of display you can achieve using them as pixels). There’s also the extremely low refresh rate to contend with… 

It takes 90 seconds to draw a digit, and refreshes every 5 minutes. That makes it useless for anything other than very vague time-keeping, but it’s so pretty that we don’t mind that. 

Finally, from the name you may have guessed that this is an Arduino project, using as it does an Arduino Nano, Nano CNC shield, three Stepstick A4982 stepper motor drivers, one Hall effect sensor, and two IR reflective sensors. We challenge the reader to re-implement this using a Raspberry Pi Pico!