Power up

What you can see here is the time in a pixel-based digital display format employing a character font, which according to the article you can change if you want to customize it. The ATmega328p flash memory is ‘only’ 32 KB which is not big enough to store more than one font variant. To install a different one, you need to resort to the Arduino IDE, embed the appropriate font library, recompile the firmware and transfer it to the MCU, but more on that later.
 
 
First impressions at power up. Display in 'Pixel-Mode'.

Setting the clock

If you press the button on the right of the four buttons at the top of the clock, the clock-setting menu appears. With the left button under titled ‘v’ on the display you can step through various options and use ‘+’ and ‘-‘ to adjust the individual values ​​and accept with the ‘OK’ button. Everything is straightforward and user-friendly except for setting the display brightness. The backlight brightness can be set to maximum or minimum and can also to be automatically adjusted according to ambient brightness, measured with an integrated LDR. This means at night the display is dimmed but still readable, while during the day it is brighter. Instead of laboriously entering the threshold values for maximum and minimum brightness using +/- and reentering etc. etc., this brightness threshold setting is fully automatic.
For the options ‘LDR Bright’ and ‘LDR Dark’ the current brightness level is measured and displayed which can then be stored with the ’OK’ button. So I set it up at night, once with the bedside light off and once with the light on. These pre-set levels are now set and I suggested to my mother she wouldn’t need to change those values.

Setting the alarm time

To set an alarm time, press the second button from the right while the clock is in time-display mode, you will see a list of nine alarm times on the screen. In addition to the actual alarm time setting you can set the ‘Day’ that the alarm time applies to or to all weekdays from Monday to Friday, it’s all pretty much self explanatory.
What I would have liked to see here for the sake of completeness, would be an ‘Always’ mode so every day of the week, from Monday to Sunday included. Maybe that will be implemented in a future firmware version. To arm the alarm (i.e. for all the set alarm times at once), press the left-hand button. The screen now shows the message that the alarm is ‘on’ or ‘off’.