I made one of those Word Clocks using an arduino, glass, wood, paint, a couple buttons, and a laser cutter.

I painted a pane of glass white, then black, and created the file for all the letter to say the time as well as happy birthday. Took it to a laser cutter to etch it into the glass.

Made a backing with leds programmed to display correctly the date and time, iterate through colors, modes, etc.

I also made it in Hebrew too. I have the code somewhere if others are interested in making it.

Edit: Here is the code in case anyone else wants to use it https://github.com/imlasky/wordclock