For a basic clock, not a lot hardware is needed. 32768 kHz crystal and a few gates and counters; dividing that first by 32768, then counting to 60, then counting to 60, then counting to 24  ? Developing that small things is laboursome, even if one was an experienced FPGA designer.

As a home lab developer, availability, easy and free toolchain, and possible user community are important. Arduino and MBED ecosystems came to my mind due to my experiences. I’m not going to back to PowerQuicc world where I was part of my earlier professional life, they’re expensive to buy and especially the tooling is not thought for garage benches.

Arduino is neat and accessible, easy to start with. I found it as the best option, and selected Espressif ESP32 as the microcontroller, as it has extensive feature set including wifi and bluetooth it’s cheap and well supported for everybody.