Last night i came up with an idea how to help my 5yo get a sense of time.

It is clear that kids are orienting on daily events to get an idea of what is coming next.
But previous events are usually a bit of a mess and hardly ever in order.

Since telling her the current time is rather useless, as it means nothing to her, i usualy use an event to time things, ie. after launch, before bed etc.

So i feel that connecting time to real life events is the key.

So here is the idea, Make a clock that changes it's background in correlation to the colors in the sky.

This is a very quick and, lets be honest..., dirty project. it only took me a few hours.
I am sure this can be much nicer and cleaner in the future, but i just wanted to give it a go...

Supplies

WeMos D1 Mini

LCD ST7735 Display

Step 1: Preparing the Board

The wiering here is preatty strait forward the ST7735 display is connected to the Wemos board as follows:

RST pin is connected to D4
CS pin is connected to D3
D/C pin is connected to D2
DIN/SCL (MOSI) pin is connected to D7
CLK/SDA (SCK) pin is connected to D5
VCC and BL are connected to pin 3V3,
GND is connected to pin GND

Step 2: Put It Togather and Upload the Code

The code is not clean and probably need a bit of work to be readable.
i'll ty to fix it in the future, right now, it works...

i'll try to describe it in a few words.

The Board boots up.
Connects to the internet.
Gets the time from NTP server.
Updates the time with DST settings

There is and array with colors pallet for 24 hours.
The colors are:

Night - Black
Blue - Morning
Yellow - Noon
Orange - Afternoon
Purple - Evening

The Pallet is drawn at the top, and serves as a reference for time as it goes by.
in the future id like to make it cycle so the current color is always in the center.

The clock updates twice per second, you can change to 200ms if it's not smooth enough for you.
The background in only updated at the beginning of an hour to avoid flickering.