The first idea to make a clock that shows the time in text was in 1986.
A graphical LCD screen had to display the time on 4 lines.
The first line with "It's now two", second line "hours",
third line "forty one" and last line "minutes" for the time 2:41.
It remained with a full design.
In 2011 I bought my first Arduino and 8x8 led display.
First I built a digital clock
and later an analog clock.
The logical follow up was to make a 7x7 clock with WS2812B based RGB LEDs.
The next step, in 2015, was to make a Text Clock with LEDs lighting up letters.
In 2020 it became clear that there is a company that granted a patent for a text clock in 2011.
See: Link to patent
They take a different approach, the text only changes every 5 minutes (1:00, 1:05, 1:10, etc.) and some extra dots to indicate the exact minutes. But their patent also covers how I implemented the text clock.
The patent talks about: "nicht überlappenden Zeichen" / "not overlapping with any other of said characters".
By using a number of overlapping letters we get a text clock that is different from what is described in the patent.
In 2023 I designed a new text clock. This clock also uses overlapping characters.
The words "PAST" and "TO" overlap. This means that the "A" and "T" are in the same place.
It is possible to highlight the "A", the "T" or leave them both off.
The same goes for the letters "S" and "O".
