PROTOTYPE #2: LED ROUND DISPLAY

We’re going to share everything we can about the process of our wall clock design.  In the beginning, you have heard a lot about how our product was inspired by David Rose’s book, Enchanted Objects.

Our reference point was to make Glance Clock useful. We were determined to display important data. Obviously it has some sort of an irresistible look.

Our first thought was to buy an LCD display from a stock and combine it with a clock. The idea was great, but we’ve started to break it down and found several issues:

• First, the LCD screen consumes a lot of energy and it will be difficult or even impossible to run a clock with this type of display from a battery. Even if we provide a power cord it will still consume a lot of energy.
• Our second issue was that LCD screens are squared, not rounded. We felt Glance Clock should be round and not square like a frame.
• Third, we discovered that with a LCD display would always be lit and bright. We believed that you would want to sleep without a bright light.

As a result, we found something better. Here is to our revolutionary product. You will love the results.

We developed a custom display with LED lights. They are bright enough to display data during the bright daylight and can be dimmed to display data in a dark room. It can control each pixel separately, therefore you can create it to your own. Our desire is to make it feel personal.

We wanted to create a display that will tell you necessary information that is valuable. We want to display arcs, segments and round lines. In the age of Retina and Super AMOLED displays that have thousands of pixels, we questioned how many pixels should the screen have?

We had a lot of questions before we came up with the final design. Should we put one LED to indicate one hour or minute? How many rounded lines should we display on a screen? How can we control LED lights in the most optimal way? And many other questions that we won’t bore you with.

Finally, we found a solution in making Glance Clock revolutionary. The magical number is 48 LED lights in one line, actually a circle with 4 lines in total. 48 LEDs lead to a full load of LED drivers because it’s multiple of 8. Therefore, it provided us a sharp image where we can display 5,10,15,20 mins and so forth precisely.

To optimize light output, each pixel is pretty equally squared shape. This allowed us to design a unique secondary optic for each LED to make a pixel’s edges sharp and with perfect color. With RGB LED each pixel can have 16M different colors and hues. It is pretty awesome to see a smart wall clock to display your life.

In addition, we added the text string to display information from all your wearable, smart home devices and web services. The final display design was completed.

Stay tuned and I will tell you about the entire electronic design process and how we were able to combine all electronics components together to make it the world’s first smart wall clock that will display your life.