Today I did something odd. I went to buy an alarm clock and as soon as I got home, took it apart. Which was easy at first, you have the display with almost invisible LED's, there's an adapter converting 220 Volt to... something lower. There's buttons, a speaker and of course the main PCB holding the brains of the clock.
In case you want to do what I'm doing, the donor clock I'm using is a Denver EC-33, costs about 8 euro's. But I reckon you could use any alarm clock.
I realize it's not going to be easy making the display work, 4 numbers separated by jars, each needing wires to the main PCB. It's gonna be messy.
For the housing I found oak strips of wood, 4 x 35 mm and decided the width of the housing should be 3 strips wide, 105 mm.
In the supermarket I selected jars that hold a spicy sauce called "sambal", which I happen to like, so no wasting here. Put the contents in a bigger jar, washed the 4 jars and they're ready to go.
While I start on the housing I'm going to have to figure out which wire out of the PCB connects to which LED eventually in the display. I took a photo of the original display and will trace the lines to get a schematic view of the different power lines.
Next time hope to have some of the housing ready and a single number display test to find out if this could actually work, since I have no clue how much power the display is using now and if that's sufficient for the upscaling I'm planning using powerful 3 mm red LED's.
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