User Manual

📱 The Home Screen

The clock uses a minimalist, gesture-based interface. There are no visible buttons on the main face; instead, the screen is divided into four invisible touch zones.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                   │                     │
│   Emotion Mode    │    Analog Clock     │
│   (Upper-Left)    │    (Upper-Right)    │
│                   │                     │
├───────────────────┼─────────────────────┤
│                   │                     │
│   Status Screen   │    Battery Screen   │
│   (Lower-Left)    │    (Lower-Right)    │
│                   │                     │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
          LONG-PRESS anywhere → Settings Carousel
            

1. Emotion Mode (Upper-Left)

Tapping the upper-left area opens a full-screen GIF animation (usually a smile). While this screen is open, Emotion Tilt is active. You can change the emotion by tilting the device:

• Upright: Smile GIF
• Tilt Backwards: Sleep GIF
• Tilt Forwards: Sad GIF
• Tilt Left/Right: Joy GIF

Note: Long-pressing the Smile GIF is the secret entrance to the Apps Menu.

2. Analog Clock (Upper-Right)

Tapping the upper-right area opens a live analog clock. It features a dynamic "pie-sector" sweep that fills as the hour progresses, providing a visual representation of the time elapsed in the current hour.

3. Status Screen (Lower-Left)

Displays the current date, WiFi connection status (SSID), and NTP sync state. While this screen is open, you can tilt the device left or right to adjust the screen brightness in 10% increments. Long-pressing on this screen opens a popup showing the Web Configuration PIN and access address.

4. Battery Screen (Lower-Right)

Shows real-time battery percentage, voltage, and raw ADC values. To power off the device, long-press on this screen to trigger a 5-second shutdown countdown.

⚙️ System Settings (The Carousel)

To enter the system settings, long-press anywhere on the home screen. This opens the Carousel menu.

Use the ◀ and ▶ arrows on the edges of the screen to swipe through the settings. Tap the center to enter a specific editor, or long-press to exit back to the clock.

🎮 Apps Menu & Games

The Apps Menu is hidden behind a "Math Gate" to keep kids entertained and challenged.

How to Enter:

1. Tap Upper-Left (Emotion Mode).
2. Long-press the GIF.
3. Solve the random arithmetic problem by tapping the correct answer.

Available Apps:

• Rock Paper Scissors: An interactive game against the CPU. Shake or hard-tilt the device to play again instantly.
• Rolling Dice: An animated dice roller. Shake the device to re-roll.
• Flip a Coin: A quick ASCII coin toss. Tap to flip.
• Metronome: A professional-grade tool. Use the slider for BPM (60-240), select time signatures (2/4, 3/4, 4/4), and follow the 🔴/🟢 beat dots.
• Tennis Letters: A Breakout-style game. Tilt the device to move the paddle and catch cycling letters from a to z.
• Letters Rain: A challenging game where letters fall in waves. Catch the target letter while dodging decoys and using modifiers (+ / - / *) to resize your paddle.
• Snake Letters: A classic snake game. Use tilt to eat letters in alphabetical order (a-z). Be careful: after reaching a certain score, "distraction" letters appear—touching them ends the game! Look out for modifiers: - shrinks your snake, and / halves its length. Tap the screen to pause, and long-press the pause menu to exit.
• Bingo!: An on-device 1–90 number caller. Tap anywhere, or tilt the device left/right, to draw the next ball — a large circle plays a cycle-and-reveal animation with a buzzer pattern before showing the number. Long-press inside the circle to see the full call history; long-press anywhere else to exit. Numbers never repeat within a game. Pair it with a printed ticket from the Web Configuration page.
• ToneQuest: A tone-memory game — repeat the sequence you are shown. Every game opens as a bubble level: tilt to move the ball and hold it inside the centre ring until the round starts (the sub-note reads level the device). Then watch — each step lights one screen edge as a glowing semicircle and sounds that edge’s own tone — and repeat it by rolling the ball into the same edges in the same order, bringing it back near the middle between moves. Level 1 is four moves and every level adds one. A mistake ends the run and shows your best; tap the popup to play again, long-press to exit. On a board with no accelerometer the game does not disappear — it takes four-way swipes instead, and a tap starts the round in place of the levelling gate. The ball still flies to the edge you sent it to, so the screen reads the same.

Playing the tilt games on a board with no motion sensor

The ESP32-S3 version of this clock has no motion sensor, so Tennis Letters, Letters Rain and Snake Letters are hidden there — there would be nothing to steer them with — and ToneQuest asks for swipes instead of tilt.

Plugging in a small KY-023 joystick gives all four back. Five jumper leads to the pin header along the edge of the board:

• GND → a GND pin (header pin 3)
• +5V → the 3V3 pin (header pin 6). Despite its label, do not connect it to 5 V — that can damage the board.
• SW → GPIO 8 (header pin 20)
• VRy → GPIO 9 (header pin 18)
• VRx → GPIO 10 (header pin 16)

Then switch it on: tap Upper-Right for the analog clock, long-press it, page right with ▶ to Extra Games, and tap. It turns green and the three missing games reappear in the Apps Menu straight away — no restart. Tap it again to turn it off, which also releases the pins.

In the Apps Menu, push the stick left or right to page through the games (hold it to keep paging), and click the stick down to start the one showing. In a game, push to steer; click once to pause and again to resume, and click on a game-over screen to play again. ToneQuest has no pause, so there a click only restarts a finished game. Exiting a game is still a long press on the touchscreen.

If an axis moves the wrong way, the module is simply mounted the other way round: set invert_x or invert_y to true under [joystick] in config.ini rather than rewiring. If something drifts while you are not touching the stick, restart the clock without holding it — the resting position is measured at start-up.

🌙 Automation & Power

Daily Brightness & Animation Schedule

The clock automatically adjusts its behavior based on the time of day:

Deep Sleep & Waking

When the device is powered off via the Battery screen, it enters a low-power deep sleep. To wake the device, press the physical RESET button on the board.

Alarm Auto-Wake: If an alarm is set in WiFi mode, the device will automatically wake up 5 minutes early to sync time via NTP, ensuring your alarm fires at the exact second. In AP or Off mode there's no sync source, so it just wakes 30 seconds before the alarm instead — and if the time can't be verified when the alarm fires, it still sounds, but shows a text warning instead of the usual animation so you know to check another clock.

🌐 Web Configuration

You can manage your clock from any web browser without needing a cable — whenever the radio is up (WiFi or AP mode; not reachable in Off/airplane mode).

Connecting:

• Home Network (WiFi mode): Go to http://esp32clock.local. If you have two clocks on the same network, give one of them a different name — set hostname = esp32clock2 under [wifi] in the config editor and reboot, then use http://esp32clock2.local. Otherwise both answer to the same address and you reach whichever replies first.
• Direct Connection (AP mode): Join the hotspot named ESP32-Clock-XXXXXX (unique per device, shown on the WiFi detail popup) — it's open, no password needed. Then go to http://192.168.4.1. AP mode also kicks in automatically if the WiFi password in config.ini keeps getting rejected, so you can always reach the web UI to fix it.

The Web Interface:

Once connected, enter the 6-digit PIN to unlock the following features:

• Config Editor: Edit config.ini directly (WiFi, Timezone, Alarm settings).
• Quick Time Set: Use the date/time picker to set the clock instantly.
• Remote Reboot: Restart the device from your browser.
• Manage Files: Browse everything on the SD card, download it, delete it, or upload new files — see below.

Managing Files:

The 📁 Manage Files button opens a page listing every file on the card with its size, plus a meter showing how much space is used and free. This is the easiest way to swap animations: upload a new GIF and it appears on the clock without ever removing the card.

• ⬇ Download saves a file to your phone or computer.
• ✖ Delete removes it, after a confirmation prompt.
• ⬆ Upload sends a new file. Choose the destination folder from the dropdown — for animations that is /cruzr_emotions. Uploading a file whose name already exists replaces it.

All three need the PIN. If a file is too big for the space left, the upload is refused before anything is written, so a full card can never end up with a half-copied GIF on it. Remember that GIFs must be 160×86 pixels — see the resizing note in the SD card setup.

One catch: deleting or uploading is refused while an animation or sub-screen is open on the clock itself, because the device may still be reading that file. Tap back to the clock face first, then retry.

No PIN needed: the 🎫 Bingo Cards button opens /bingo in a new tab — a printable sheet of UK/housie-style tickets (3×9, 1–90) generated fresh in your browser to pair with the on-device Bingo! caller. Choose 4, 6, or 8 tickets per page, then print.