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> The Pi 3B+ seems just enough to render some simple animations.

> I think a Pi 4 might be a good sweet spot between processing power and price,

I know this isn't exactly a serious product and more of a gadget/gimmick but man we are off by a factor of like 3-4 here :D

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If they didn’t use an entire browser to render the clock face this seems like it could be an Arduino/ESP32-esque project.

Driving HDMI is way harder then you would guess; extremely fast timing to hit. A naive framebuffer alone won't fit in RAM, whilst not strictly needed it would make it a hard challenge.

An FPGA project then! Which reminds me, I should really try some...

Yes a very fun FPGA project; but you will end up more expensive and more power hungry then a Pi Zero W which is more or less perfect for this use-case.

This. I've recently been porting my ECS-based 3d game/app engine for my 256MB Raspi Zero AND ESP32-S3, so reading that you need gigabytes to comfortably render a clock appears just ... stupid.

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