Abacus Clock

-- UPDATE FOUR--

So guys,

today my wires finally arrived but in the meantime I read about the Pi's 3.3V rail and their maximum current draw.

So I came across this problem that the maximum current the Pi can handle on its 3.3V rail is 51mA (correct me if I'm wrong), which is reached after 3 LEDs lighting up. Take e.g. 19:49 and you will have 15 LEDs burning each drawing 15mAs.

Since this is my only Pi and I can't afford another one I will rebuild the circuit a little bit but I am not yet sure whether I want to use transistors or go over the 5V rail which can handle 750mA to my knowledge.

Anyway, Yann Guidon / YGDES who is a follower of this project answered my questions on how to optimize the circuit and we will team up in a second project which will have an optimized version both of the circuit and the code to be more compact.

I will now upload the source code how it came to my mind when I first thought of the project. Be careful not to re-build my circuit yet because it could potentially damage your Pi!

When I was testing if everything works my Pi2B did not have any problems or instability problems but I never had more than 7-9 LEDs glowing at the same time and to be honest I do not want to risk executing the code at 19:49!

I hope you had fun following the project (this is not the end) and I will soon post a link to our (Yann and I) new project. Stay tuned and feel free to follow me for more easy but practical stuff done with the Raspberry Pi.

-- UPDATE THREE--

Guys, I couldn't help it. I had to continue working and now the clock is near to its final state.

I'm lacking 5 m-f-jumper wires but I already ordered some and they are expected to ship on Thursday.

While waiting I completely assembled the rest of the clock's circuitry and added the lines to get row 3 to work.

Here's an image of the clock:

When everything is finished on Thursday I'll post the complete source code as well. I am always open for suggestions on code-improvement and other stuff.

See you then!

--UPDATE TWO--

Now I've come up with a way to reduce the amount of code drastically.

I will use 10 functions to turn the LEDs on and off depending on the current time. This is 'eight' for example:

def displayEight(led_1, led_2, led_3, led_4, led_5):
    GPIO.output(led_1, True)
    GPIO.output(led_2, True)
    GPIO.output(led_3, True)
    GPIO.output(led_4, True)
    GPIO.output(led_5, False)

In addition I installed another row of LEDs today but now I don't have any more LEDs and need to order some which is why I won't be posting any updates for a few days.

Here's how my breadboard is looking right now (don't mind the knife, I needed to open a pack of resistors):

--FIRST UPDATE--

So after a bit of experimentation I finally came up with an unoptimized code to display the factors of 10 of the minutes.

Like I said, this is just for me to be sure everything will work like I imagined.

I took a picture of the testing-setup while it was displaying 23:3xh.

Today I will continue to get the second part of the minutes section to work.

Her you have my unoptimized code. Let's see what I can do to make it a bit shorter in the final product:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-


# modules
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
from time import strftime, sleep


# setup GPIO
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setup(5, GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(6, GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(13, GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(19, GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(26, GPIO.OUT)


# functions
def displayTime():
  minutes = strftime("%M")  
  row_3 = int(minutes)/10    
  row_4 = int(minutes)%10    
  if row_3 == 5:
    GPIO.output(5, True)
    GPIO.output(6, False)
    GPIO.output(13, False)
    GPIO.output(19, False)
    GPIO.output(26, False)
  elif row_3 == 4:
    GPIO.output(5, False)
    GPIO.output(6, True)
    GPIO.output(13, True)
    GPIO.output(19, True)
    GPIO.output(26, True)
  elif row_3 == 3:
    GPIO.output(5, False)
    GPIO.output(6, True)
    GPIO.output(13, True)
    GPIO.output(19, True)
    GPIO.output(26, False)
  elif row_3 == 2:
    GPIO.output(5, False)
    GPIO.output(6, True)
    GPIO.output(13, True)
    GPIO.output(19, False)
    GPIO.output(26, False)
  elif row_3 == 1:
    GPIO.output(5, False)
    GPIO.output(6, True)
    GPIO.output(13, False)
    GPIO.output(19, False)
    GPIO.output(26, False)
  else:
    GPIO.output(5, False)
    GPIO.output(6, False)
    GPIO.output(13, False)
    GPIO.output(19, False)
    GPIO.output(26, False)


# main program
def main():
  try:
    while True:
      sleep(0.1)
      displayTime()
  except KeyboardInterrupt:
    GPIO.cleanup()

if __name__ == "__main__":
  main()

I hope you have fun following the project! See you soon.

Tue, May 10th 2016, 23:25 CEST

Project started.