Most of these issues are already solved and "canned" on 8052.COM. Isn't copying these and modifying them pretty trivial? I'm persuaded that considerable effort was put into the examples to make them just that ... trivial!

BTW, most clocks don't rely on radio time signal, but, rather, rely on line frequency. Using that's pretty trivial too, isn't it? I suppose one could add it as a requirement, but unless the clock runs without batteries, it won't drift much while the mains power is unavailable.

I didn't see a "canned" solution for the ambient light detection & brightness compensation, and that could be the core challenge. PWM is pretty well described, though. A more thorough search of 8052.COM will probably produce a couple of examples of light measurement ... at least enough to reduce the problem to a table-lookup.

If there were to be any sort of challenge at all, I'd expect a requirement for, at least, a few pages of math (not just arithmetic).

RE