I built a ClockClock 24 — a digital clock made out of twenty-four little analogue ones. The hands sweep into position to form the digits, hold them for a minute, then break formation and do something else before sweeping back. It is 24 round LCD panels on eight ESP32s, about €210, and it runs entirely from Home Assistant.
The add-on
Add the repository under Settings → Add-ons → Repositories and it turns up in the store. It is a sidebar item over Ingress — no port to open, no second login — and it finds the clock by itself from a project marker the firmware carries, rather than asking you to name entities.
Mode, the rotation and how often it turns over, how the hands travel to a new digit, sweep length, animation speed, and the hand and background colours — all live, all reaching every one of the 24 clocks in a single packet. Underneath they are ordinary entities, so a sunset automation is two service calls: warm the hands to amber, slow the animation down. Everything is saved to flash, so the wall comes back the way you left it after a power cut.
You do not actually need the hardware
The same engine runs in a browser, so the add-on also gives you a dashboard card and full-screen displays for wall tablets — each with its own link and its own colours. It is not a picture of the clock; it is the firmware's own code with a canvas instead of panels.
Draw your own patterns
Beyond the built-in choreographies, a pattern is 24 poses and motions stored as one line of text. Draw one in the editor, press Send, and 24 real clocks are running it a second later — nothing recompiled, nothing reflashed. Its name then appears in the mode list beside the built-in ones, and drops into the rotation like any of them.
ESPHome underneath
The firmware is ESPHome, using a custom component I wrote for
its LVGL. That is why the Home Assistant side is so tidy: every control above is a
template select / number / text /
button on the master board, discovered automatically — no
custom integration, no API code, nothing to configure. One board has Wi-Fi and
broadcasts the time and the animation to the other seven down a single wire, so
only that board is ever reflashed.
Try it in your browser: tuct.github.io/esphome-lvgl-clock · Source, BOM, PCB: github.com/tuct/esphome-lvgl-clock