Tempo | Radio-Controlled Wooden LED Clock

A radio-controlled clock sets itself. There is a long-wave time signal broadcast from Mainflingen, just outside Frankfurt, that carries the exact time from Germany's atomic clocks, and this one listens for it overnight. You plug it in, and by morning it is right — not approximately right, but right to the second. It picks up the change to and from summer time on its own too, which makes it the one clock in the house you never have to think about again.

The body is wood rather than the usual black plastic box. The LED numerals sit behind the timber face, so the display reads as figures showing through the grain instead of a lit panel bolted to a shell. Alongside the time it gives the room temperature and the humidity, and the second of those is more useful than it sounds through a Dutch winter, when the heating runs for months and the air quietly dries out.

It is made in two shapes. The rectangle is long and shallow, 23.8 cm across and only 5.5 cm deep, which suits a shelf edge or the back of a desk where depth is short. The triangle is narrower and deeper at 20 cm wide and sits at an angle, so the face tilts up towards you — the better of the two for a bedside table you read from lying down. Both come in bamboo, black or brown wood, and both arrive with a mains adapter in the box.

• Timekeeping: radio-controlled, syncs itself to the DCF77 atomic time signal
• Display: LED numerals behind a solid wood face
• Readout: time, alarm, room temperature and humidity
• Rectangle: 238 × 55 × 83 mm, 310 g
• Triangle: 200 × 95 × 87 mm, 370 g
• Finishes: bamboo, black or brown wood
• Power: mains adapter included