In August 2024 I took a trip to Münster, Germany. Somewhere along the way I came across the QlockTwo, the word clock designed by Marco Biegert and Andreas Funk. Instead of digits, it spells the time out in a grid of letters: “es ist fünf nach halb elf”. I was hooked, but the things are realy expensive, and I wanted to combine it with my IT background.
So I built my own. Online, in the browser.
I started it after the trip and had it working within the week. It’s deliberately simple: plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, fully client-side. No build step, no dependencies. You can open the files locally and it just runs.
The whole thing is a fixed grid of letters. Every minute, the script works out which words need to light up and highlights them, leaving the rest dimmed. I kept the German layout from the original, so the matrix reads ES IST FÜNF ZEHN ZWANZIG ... down to the hours. The clock rounds to the nearest five minutes, exactly like the physical QlockTwo.
It’s live at qlocktwo.teqcloud.net, and the source is on GitHub.
A small project, but one of my favourites. A souvenir from Münster that tells me the time.