Arturo Abruzzini's Mondrian Clock Mixes the Worlds of Art and Mathematics, Using a Raspberry Pi Pico

Maker Arturo Abruzzini has built a clock with a difference, combining the worlds of art and mathematics to display the time in a Piet Mondrian-inspired artwork using a modified Fibonacci sequence.

"This is a remake of something I came up with 10 years ago in high school," Abruzzini explains, "when I was so bored by my biology lessons that I started doodling a Fibonacci based binary sequence. At the time I made it into a laser cut spiral with LEDs on it powered by an Arduino, which has since broken and I haven't gotten round to fixing."

Needing another unusual timepiece to fill the hole left by the original, Abruzzini decided to take a different approach to the same concept. While still using a modified Fibonacci sequence — named for Leonardo of Pisa, and traditionally a sequence in which each number is made up of the sum of the preceding two numbers — the familiar golden-ratio curve is not obviously seen, and in its place are blocks of primary colors inspired by the abstract art of Piet Mondrian.

"I first tried to overcomplicate it by using thermochromic pigments to paint a canvas and custom sized heating pads to turn them 'on' and 'off,'" Abruzzini recalls, "but ran into issues controlling the pads fast enough for it to work. More recently I got renewed energy to make it work again and started looking at LED panels as a way to achieve the same effect, with the idea of diffusing the lights onto some paper. This snowballed into me buying a 3D printer to achieve this, but I'm pretty happy with the result!"

Behind the diffuser, hidden inside the frame of the build, is a quartet of 32×32 RGB LED matrices linked to an Interstate 75 W driver — itself serving as a carrier board for a Raspberry Pi Pico W and its RP2040 microcontroller. Everything is powered by a dramatically over-specced 200W 5V power supply from Abruzzini's spares drawer — "though 20W is more than enough," the maker notes.

"The more poetic take on this clock is that it makes it very difficult to tell the time," Abruzzini admits, "even though all the data is there, and the shape could be enough of a hint to be able to decode it without prior knowledge (only one friend of mine has managed that feat so far). Maybe something about showing time as an abstract concept by disguising it as abstract art…"

A build guide and source code for the project are available on Abruzzini's Instructables page.