ChronoBloom is a clock built by a dad to keep time, and to keep life above the project at hand. Look up. Shift gears. Tend to what matters.

I work in mental health as my day job, but I built this as the patient, not the clinician. It's the tool I wanted and couldn't buy.

## Why I built it

I can be prone to distractibility and hyperfocus, losing an hour or three in my lair working on a project with the intent to "just gonna run downstairs and print something out." Next thing I know, my six-year-old is asking "Dad, you said you were gonna print me those color pages."

Alarms are for hard rules. One lands mid-thought, I swipe it away, and I've already forgotten it. Reminder nudges do something different: they guide focus and shift priorities. A change of light in the room does work. So I put it in the thing I already look up to. And to look pretty.

The clock doesn't nag and there's nothing to dismiss. Every so often the light does something slow and obvious at the edge of your vision, and you get to decide what happens next. An alarm demands. A nudge asks. It helps that it's pretty, and that it's already on the wall doing a job, so I never resent it going off.

The project will still be there tomorrow. My kids being this age won't.

## The two printed parts, and where they came from

This is a decade-long remix. I've been building and rebuilding this clock for about ten years, and this generation turns it into a focus clock you can flash straight from a browser.

Two different parts, and the names matter because they do opposite jobs.

The reflector is the piece behind the LEDs that shapes the light into pointed hands. That shape descends from Steve Manley's 2015 design, and it's why this clock looks the way it does. The part here is not his file though: I reworked the infill patterns and the mounting holes on it.

The front diffuser is a separate thin printed sheet that sits over the face and softens the pixels into a bloom. That one is mine, and it took a lot of trial and error to land on.

Steve's original ran on an Arduino Nano with a separate clock chip and an audio-spectrum visualizer. This is the modern take: the whole thing moves onto a Seeed XIAO ESP32-C3 and becomes a little network device.

## What changed in this generation

No more clock chip. The ESP32-C3 pulls the time off the internet and sorts out timezones and daylight saving on its own. Way simpler than the old way, a separate RTC wired up with a coin battery hot-glued wherever the jumper wires could reach but still stay outta the way.

All the controls live in your browser. No app to install, nothing out of an app store. The clock hosts its own control page. Get on the same wifi, open it from your phone or laptop, and every ring's color and brightness, the palettes, the animations, they're all right there. You reach it by name, no hunting around for IP addresses.

Set it up once, no passwords buried in code. First time it powers on it makes its own little wifi network. Join it from your phone, pick your home network, type the password, done. It remembers, saved on the clock itself, and connects on its own from then on.

The first flash happens from a web page now too. Nothing to install on your computer, nothing to set up. Chrome or Edge on a desktop, plug in the USB-C cable, click Install, and the clock is running. Building from source with PlatformIO is still there if you like it that way.

Updates go over the air. After the very first flash over a USB cable, everything after that uploads straight from the browser. The inner ring turns into a little progress bar while it works.

It reads the room. A light sensor watches how bright things are and fades the clock to match, quick enough you never really catch it moving. Pitch-dark bedroom and it shuts the LEDs off entirely. Light comes back, the clock fades back in.

Focus reminders. Gentle light animations at whatever interval you set. No sound, nothing to swipe away. Just a change out at the edge of your vision,...