One of the first decisions I made on this project was to use a Sharp Memory LCD display, the same display technology used in the Pebble smartwatches. These displays fill a great niche IMO - they're sunlight-readable like e-ink, but they have a much faster refresh rate (can do smooth animations) and still use very low power.

The easiest way to get started playing with this tech is to buy a breakout board from Adafruit ($25) and hook it up to an MCU with enough RAM to keep a framebuffer in it. I got started breadboarding it with a Trinket M0. The Trinket is pretty minimal, but it's enough to start tinkering with the hardware. I programmed it using Arduino and the Adafruit Sharp Memory Display code library.

I also wanted to experiment with an external low-power RTC for timekeeping, so I added a DS3231 breakout. The DS3231 communicates over I2C and, once again, comes with an easy-to-use Arduino library from Adafruit - see the tutorial for details.

So here's my first bit of hardware - a minimal Arduino clock on a breadboard!