Start with a micro controller kit that has its own IDE (Arduino Nano is US$5 UC, and kit US$40 [so many choices], Raspberry, etc) and RGB LEDS (save the neopixel for later). Learn (youtube) how to make an LED circuit without needing a UC. Then make an RGBLED circuit and use the Nano to get some effects going (fading, pulsing, flickering, heartbeat, et c.).
Then play with any RTC (real time clock) module with the Arduino.
Play with conditional statements (if...then).
Marry the Arduino-RTC-LEDs.
Then look up power consumption and power supply needs for large amounts of LEDs (you cant power mote than a handful with the UC boards - they just do the controlling).
Do something no one has done (good luck). Use diffuser panels (sanded plexi) maybe? Hide things under rocks. Make it pulse at the top of the hour. OOo! Listen to the SW Time Signal and colorize that ("At the tone the time will be x hours... boop boop boop BEEP")...
Put your crazy cap on!
[Edit) add proximity or human-IR sensor to raise the brightness and maybe the tone[/edit]
Oh, I was too wordy? That's not the style on this forum? I'm pretty new to this part of Arduino, I'll assume that's what you meant and keep it in mind, thanks!
To be fair, there are newlines between their paragraphs, but the problem is there's only one newline between paragraphs (Markdown requires at least one blank line, i.e. two newlines, between paragraphs).
Don't worry about what Markdown wants or needs, just look at the preview before you hit the Reply button
The lack of blank lines between paragraphs is not inherently due to Markdown, it is doing what you told it to. Press Return once and you get a Carriage Return and a Linefeed. Press it twice and you get 2 and hence a blank line. What the forum software does do is to remove what are seen as superfluous blank lines. Try hitting Return several times to see the effect
Markdown is a lightweight markup language that this forum and many other sites like GitHub use. It's basically designed to convert readable plain text (what you see in the editor) to neatly formatted text (what you see in the preview and after you post). For plain text there's a nearly universal convention to include a blank line between paragraphs, and there are common conventions for marking text as **bold**, _italic_, etc., and for things like quoted text (each line starts with >) and code blocks. Markdown has adopted those conventions, which makes it (hopefully) relatively straightforward to write for most people.
There are other lightweight markup languages like AsciiDoc and reStructured Text that work basically the same way but have different ways to do more advanced things like tables and hyperlinks. I'm sort of a fanboy of AsciiDoc myself since it has somewhat cleaner and more standardized syntax than Markdown, but I can easily and happily deal with Markdown because it's about 99% the same as AsciiDoc for my everyday basic formatting needs.
But anyway, like UKHeliBob said, just look at the preview pane on the right side to see how your text will be formatted.
In the previous version(s) of the forum, you had to select a "preview" function to see what your contribution looked like before you actually posted it. We had to remind people of the critical importance of using that preview to avoid posting garble.
In the present incarnation, if you have a decent screen ("if"), you already have a proper preview and the option to full-window it. Even so, people seem not always to pay attention.
