animatedpixelclock

AnimatedPixelClock is an ESP32-S3 firmware project that drives a 128x64 HUB75 RGB LED matrix as an animated retro-arcade clock. It targets two chained 64x64 P2.5 HUB75E panels (1/32 scan, FM6126A) and supports hand-wired ESP32-S3 boards as well as the Waveshare ESP32-S3-RGB-Matrix driver board, with separate pin maps and a compile-time override contract. The clock offers fourteen styles plus a Cycle All mode, including Mario, Space Invaders, Pong/Arkanoid, Pac-Man, Snake, Tetris, Asteroids, Dino Runner, Matrix Rain, TRON, Bomberman, Doom Fire, Standard, Large, and a Weather Clock. Animated styles rebuild digits on the hour rollover. Colors for digits, characters, effects, and backgrounds are editable per style. A built-in web interface covers clock settings, display brightness with scheduled night dimming and power-off windows, colon blink, adaptive refresh, timezone selection with automatic DST via POSIX TZ rules, NTP server configuration with a test probe, network settings (DHCP/static, mDNS, boot IP display), PC monitor layout with drag-and-drop preview, JSON config export/import, and OTA firmware upload. Diagnostics are available in the portal and via an API endpoint. Optional features include a Weather Clock using Open-Meteo (no API key required, fetched every 10 minutes), ambient screensavers (Space Invaders, Pac-Man, starfield, aquarium, burning room) with optional corner clock and scheduling, custom GIF animations converted to a compact .pca format and uploaded to device storage, and a WS2812B LED strip on a spare GPIO with effects such as Solid, Wave, Rainbow, Fire, Meteor, Scanner, Hour sweep, Weather, and Audio VU. The strip follows panel power and dimming state and supports current limiting. A desktop companion app can stream PC performance stats (CPU/GPU/RAM/network) and audio FFT data for the panel visualizer and strip VU meter. The project documents hardware wiring, power options, pin maps, and build photos, and notes it is not affiliated with the rights holders of the referenced game styles.