We’ve mentioned our super cool Maker Lab in Pi Towers a few times. It’s a maker’s paradise packed with all the equipment you could ever need to build pretty much any Raspberry Pi-powered project you want. One of those things is a Bambu Lab A1 mini 3D printer, and when we opened up the box to set it up, we found a surprise free gift. Apparently one of a few random gifts is shipped with every new 3D printer, and we wound up with (LOL) a clock mechanism.

I gather these gifts are there to inspire the owner of the printer to get stuck in with their first project. It worked on us: we made a Raspberry Pi wall clock to help us keep track of the hours ticking away as we play in the Maker Lab.

Going off piste

Most users follow the instructions to download Bambu Lab’s suggested 3D printable clock face design. However, we aren’t most users, so of course we decided to go off piste with our own Pi-centric design.

Our lovely graphic design team provided the official Raspberry Pi logo. Then our Maker in Residence traced it in CNC’s LightBurn, making sure to add a hole in the centre for the clock mechanism and hands. He transferred the resulting file to our absolutely gigantic laser cutter so he could render it IRL in acrylic sheeting. A little bit of black, green, and raspberry red spray paint later, and we have a (kind of) official Raspberry Pi clock for our wall.

Super simple

Once the raspberry clock face was all ready, everything was super simple. We just had to hold the clock mechanism in place on the back while we fixed the hour, minute, and second hands onto the plastic bit sticking through the hole. It’s honestly one of the easiest builds to come out of the Maker Lab.

Throw LEDs at it

We noticed there’s plenty of space on the back of the clock to mount a Raspberry Pi Pico. That could power a strip of Adafruit’s NeoPixels that we’d like to glue around the edge. We have yet to grow out of our compulsion to add LEDs to everything we make; I think it’s charming.