Concept render · 16×16 WS2812 · ESP32-S3
Both faces below are the same grid, same firmware, live right now — they're showing your actual local time using the real word-clock logic, and the demo buttons run the actual animation concepts. The only differences between the two concepts are the enclosure and how loudly the filler letters announce themselves.
Animations run on both faces at once so you can compare how each shell carries them. On the real clock these fire automatically on time changes, on an idle timer, or from the web UI.
The clock reads the exact minute in words — IT IS TWENTY THREE MINUTES PAST FOUR. What makes per-minute wording fit a 16×16 grid is letter-sharing: FOURTEEN carries FOUR inside it, SEVENTEEN carries SEVEN, TWONE is TWO and ONE, THREELEVEN is THREE and ELEVEN, and PASTO is PAST and TO. Because the letters are a fixed stencil, the Matrix rain has a lovely property: the "falling glyphs" are the real letters of the face, and the rain literally resolves into the time.
You don't need a multi-colour printer for the cabinet look. The face plate uses your layer-swap trick (dark → white diffuser → dark, letters as voids in a pixel stencil font). The cabinet livery is achieved by printing the shell as separate parts in different filament colours — black body, amber marquee surround, red/yellow T-moulding strips that snap into grooves — which is exactly how real cabinets are built, and single-colour parts assembled always look cleaner than colour changes mid-part. The marquee text itself can be a second stencil with an LED behind it.
The decision: shell A or shell B — everything on the screen is common to both. There's also a middle path: the subtle wedge with a snap-on marquee, so the cabinet is optional dress-up.