It all started with the Show, with the specific moment (spoiler alert... not really) during which Joyce Byers communicates with her son Will, stuck in the upside down world, thru Christmas light strings / garland and a hand painted alphabet on the wall of her living room.

I wanted to craft a decorative item for the shop, stranger things themed, and I figured this iconic situation could spell anything, any message, so why not a clock.

It's also a tribute to Tokyo Flash watches (https://tokyoflash.com/collections/watches) which can be very creative for telling the time in the most cumbersome way, even if not yet to the grade of the brainfuck programming language.

Just like every props work I do, it generally starts with a bit of research and in this case, I wanted to find a proper replica of Joyce's house wall paper.

Using my best google-fu and its image compare, I managed to find a reproduction of the wall paper, that seems to be dated from a 1940-1950's collection and is called "sugar and spice"

https://www.onairdesign.com/products/sugar-and-spice-d-av361?variant=31404289556544
From there, I used adobe Illustrator to make aligned sheets of this wall paper and vectorized the hand painted alphabet

Finally, I scaled everything so that it matches the layout from the show, still in illustrator.
From there, I laser cut a box (makercase.com) further edited in Illustrator, and added a 3mm laser cut acrylic topper with the Stranger things logo, lit up by a spare WS2812 ledstrip (144 pixels/m, about 50 pixels used here) and glued the wall paper pieces in place with woodglue. 
The brain is a Node MCU ESP8266 board (very convenient as it has the USB serial to flash the board without any other HW) / ESP12-E that runs the NTP client library and the adafruit neopixel library, with some homebrew classes for dimming colors without using the FastLed library

At boot time, the ESP connects to my wifi and shows the boot progress / NTP init states thru a series of blue dots then finally all the leds / pixels fade in. The time is displayed this way :

• Between 2 spelled updates, seconds are displayed, since there's only 16 pixels (alphabet letters) those go at a pace of 2.3 seconds, making time perception artificially slower, a bit like in the upside-down
• Once a minute kicks in, the time is spelled with the hours first, on 2 digits including a leading zero, followed by letters HRS. Then after a short pause, minutes are spelled out, 2 digits + MIN letters. Due to letters being only available once, spelling is simplified sometimes, FOUR gets it all, 3 becomes THRE, etc.

Clearly, more can be added to this. I'm probably going to add a light "mayhem" with randomized bursts, every hour (like when the gorgon monster tries to enter the Bayer's house and bends / melts walls.

The alphabet panel is easily removable to access the electronics in the back, held in place with magnets. The string was nailed to the laser cut MDF and some transparent hot glue ensures nothing is wobbling too much. Lego minifigs (ok... clones...) were added to spice it up. The whole thing is powered by a 18650 li-ion installed in a micro UPS which recharge port is exported on the side of the box, as well as the general power switch.