Glance Clock Control

A native Windows app that brings original Glance Clock hardware back to life.

The original Glance Clock is still a great piece of hardware: physical hands, four RGB LED rings, a 32 by 8 LED matrix, Bluetooth, sound, and a surprisingly capable animation system. The old cloud and phone-app workflow is the part that aged badly.

Glance Clock Control replaces that missing software with one portable Windows application. It synchronizes the clock from Windows, controls the display directly over Bluetooth Low Energy, restores weather faces and animations, and adds a few useful things the hardware can handle but the original app never fully exposed.

This is an unofficial community project. It is not affiliated with the original Glance company or product team.

Download

Download the current portable build:

GlanceClockControl.exe

It is a self-contained 64-bit Windows executable. There is no installer, account, API key, or separate .NET runtime to install. The EXE is currently unsigned, so Windows may show an Unknown publisher warning.

What it restores

• Windows time, date, timezone, and daylight-saving synchronization through the standard Bluetooth Current Time Service
• Direct connection to a paired Glance Clock over Bluetooth LE
• Digital time, date format, brightness, hour-marker dots, activity timeout, night mode, quiet hours, DND, mute, and hourly chime controls
• Original-style temperature and chance-of-rain ring faces
• 24-hour sunlight, wind, and humidity ring faces using the same forecast-scene hardware primitive
• A saved weather carousel with configurable automatic rotation
• Hourly or multi-hour weather animations aligned to an exact first time each day
• A detailed weather briefing with selectable sounds, one-shot condition animation, temperature, low and high, feels-like, humidity, pressure, wind, and rain chance
• Sunrise, sunset, rain chance, direct sunlight, diffuse light, wind, humidity, and pressure from Open-Meteo
• Notice Studio with the Glance icon glyphs, animations, colors, priorities, sounds, and text behaviors
• Native on-clock timers and interval timers
• Scheduled stretch reminders with optional sound
• Safe scene navigation, single-slot deletion, guarded clear-all, hand alignment, and a hardware showcase
• Start with Windows, notification-area operation, diagnostics, and local crash reports

First run

1. Pair the clock in Windows Settings > Bluetooth & devices. Its name normally begins with GlanceClock or Glance Clock.
2. Exit the old phone app or any other Glance bridge. Only one device can reliably own the connection and Current Time Service at once.
3. Run GlanceClockControl.exe.
4. The app starts the Current Time Service and looks for the paired clock automatically.
5. Select Sync time now.
6. Look for a confirmed time read in Activity. If the clock does not request the time, leave the app running and power the clock off and back on once.

Closing the window keeps the app running in the notification area. Right-click the tray icon and select Exit to stop it fully. Starting the EXE again brings the hidden window back.

Weather

Enter a city or postal code and select Load forecast. The resolved location, exact coordinates, timezone, units, carousel choices, colors, and schedule are stored for the current Windows user and restored on the next launch.

Weather comes directly from Open-Meteo. No app account, API key, Windows location permission, or Glance cloud relay is used.

The weather carousel can install:

Slot	Face	Notes
0	Digital time	Built-in watchface, optional
1	Temperature	Original-style 24-value temperature forecast
2	Rain chance	Original-style rain probability face
3	Solar light	Dark at night, white for diffuse daylight, yellow for stronger direct light
4	Wind	24-hour wind-speed forecast
5	Humidity	24-hour relative-humidity forecast

Checked faces are written and unchecked app-managed faces are removed. Slots above 5 are left alone. The Windows app must remain running for timed carousel movement and scheduled weather announcements.

The detailed briefing starts with the selected sound and the current forecast's real condition animation. That opener is sent once and also counts as the Conditions card, so it is not immediately repeated. The remaining cards begin after a four-second lead and stay silent.

Notifications, sounds, and timers

Notice Studio exposes the known Glance icon bytes, 23 animation choices, 25 colors, five priorities, and the APK text behaviors:

• Once: 1
• Repeat: 32
• Rapid: 64
• Delay: 128

Sounds 1 through 12 were audible on the tested clock running firmware 1.6.8. The APK also names sound IDs 13 through 17, but those packets were silent on that firmware, so the normal selectors hide them.

Timer intervals are delivered to the clock and continue on the hardware after the packet is accepted. The Windows progress indicator is only an estimate. The clock remains the timer authority.

Quiet hours and night mode

The app treats the clock's quiet controls separately:

• Automatic night mode uses the clock's ambient-light behavior
• Scheduled DND suppresses interruptions
• Scheduled silent hours suppress sounds
• Permanent DND and permanent mute are independent overrides

Settings are read from the clock, shown in the app, written back while preserving unknown fields, and verified with a settings readback.

Safety and privacy

The normal UI does not expose pairing wipe, firmware replacement, user-data reset, or undocumented destructive commands. Clear-all and scene deletion require confirmation. Bluetooth writes are serialized so weather, timers, settings, and manual actions cannot pile onto the same GATT characteristic.

There is no telemetry or cloud account. Preferences stay under HKCU\Software\GlanceTimeBridge. Crash reports stay under %LOCALAPPDATA%\GlanceClockControl\Logs. Read PRIVACY.md for the complete data flow and removal steps.

Requirements

• 64-bit Windows 10 or Windows 11
• Bluetooth Low Energy adapter with central and peripheral roles
• Original Glance Clock already paired with Windows
• Internet access only if weather is used

The tested hardware reports firmware 1.6.8. Other firmware versions may behave differently, especially for sounds, animations, and optional device information.

Build from source

The repository pins .NET SDK 10.0.204 in global.json.

dotnet restore GlanceTimeBridge.csproj -r win-x64
dotnet build GlanceTimeBridge.csproj -c Release
dotnet publish GlanceTimeBridge.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true `
  -p:PublishSingleFile=true `
  -p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true `
  -p:DebugType=None `
  -p:DebugSymbols=false `

Run the offline protocol and policy checks with:

dotnet run --project tests/GlanceChecks/GlanceChecks.csproj -c Release

Live Open-Meteo checks are opt-in:

dotnet run --project tests/GlanceChecks/GlanceChecks.csproj -c Release -- --live

Groundwork and thanks

This project only became possible because other people preserved and reverse-engineered the abandoned ecosystem.

• Hypfer/glance-clock documents the BLE service, command headers, protobuf payloads, settings, scenes, priorities, icons, time synchronization, and other behavior. Its Glance.proto work was the essential protocol foundation and is licensed under WTFPL.
• Hypfer/glance-clock-assets preserves API references, manuals, old documentation, firmware material, icon references, and sound references. That archive was invaluable for understanding what the original hardware and app were supposed to do.
• PorlyBe/glance_clock_ha provided a useful second interoperability reference.
• PorlyBe/bluetooth-cts provided another practical Current Time Service reference.
• Open-Meteo provides the account-free forecast and geocoding APIs used by the app.

See THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt for the full attribution notes.

Contributing

Old hardware is messy. Firmware variants, Bluetooth adapters, Windows builds, and clock state can all change behavior. If you find something weird, open an issue with the clock firmware, Windows version, Bluetooth adapter, exact action, and relevant Activity output. Do not include private location data unless it is necessary.

Pull requests are welcome. Keep protocol changes traceable to a capture, APK behavior, documented groundwork, or repeatable hardware observation.

License

WTFPL Version 2. Do whatever the fuck you want to.