ElektroThing's RetroThing Is an Espressif ESP32-Powered Smart Clock with Vintage Aesthetics

Cambridge-based ElektroThing is preparing to launch an open source, Espressif ESP32-powered smart desk clock that can push time, weather, and sensor readings to your eyeballs over an LED matrix display: the RetroThing.

"RetroThing reimagines the classic LED matrix display for the IoT [Internet of Things] era," claims ElektroThing's YJ of the project. "Its four 5×7 LED matrices offer a generous display area, perfect for showing time, weather information, and environmental data. The ESP32-S2 at its core provides robust processing power and Wi-Fi connectivity, enabling a wide range of smart features."

At its heart, the RetroThing is a desk clock — pulling time data from a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server over the Espressif ESP32-S2's Wi-Fi radio and displaying it on the chunky 5×7 LED matrix dominating the front of the board. That's only part of the story: in addition to knowing what time it is, the RetroThing uses a geolocation database to know where it is — correcting for local time automatically, and localizing for weather information pulled down over the OpenWeather application programming interface (API).

Time-keeping and weather monitoring features are rounded out by sensor display functionality: the board is designed to host an AHT20 environmental sensor, which feeds temperature and humidity readings to the display. An adaptive lighting system adjusts brightness according to ambient conditions, while a 3D-printed enclosure — the design of which, at the time of writing, had yet to be finalized — diffuses the light for a more even glow.

YJ has detailed the project here on Hackster.io, with the promise that the RetroThing will be fully open source; at the time of writing, though, it was not present in any ElektroThing GitHub repository.