A collection of various projects.
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| A Dual Zone 'accurate clock' |
It's nice to have a clock in the Ham Radio shack that gives UTC and local time. Even nicer a digital one with a reasonable sized TFT display. I take absolutely NO credit for this project. It's based (ie copied) on a project from Bruce Hall, W8BH. I came across this project on the SoftwareControlledHamRadio Groups.io group where Bruce posted links to his project. Thanks Bruce. (Bruce has a number of cool clock projects on his web pages. http://www.w8bh.net/clocks.pdf ) It's highly configurable for your time zone and also automatic daylight saving time. It gets it's time from any of the various NTP time services available around the world. The micro Bruce uses, has in-built WiFi so can connect to these servers. Assuming you have a connection to the WWW of course. Perfect in other words.! See http://www.w8bh.net/NTP_DualClock.pdf Full details of the clock and how it works. Bruces Github software for this project.
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| VK3PE's IMPLEMENTATION: |
Bruce's project uses a 2.8" 320x240 ILI9341 TFT display which I happened to have available. He uses an ESP32 'Feather' for the micro. I didn't have that board but did have two other ESP32 boards in my collecton for other projects. (simpleSA and FT-7 VFO) I also had a a couple of PCB's from those projects so implementation of the clock was very simple for me to try it out. I tried both of the ESP32 boards I had and both worked. Note that you need to install a couple of new LIBraries which are given in the source code. Some changes to the TFT_eSPI.LIB are required but are detailed on Bruce's pages. This is the ESP32 VROOM module mounted on a 'simpleSA' board I had available.
And the clock working:
And an ESP32 WROOM-32 board on another of my project boards.
The small green area at top right shows the WiFi signal strength. Of course, one can elect to modify Bruce's screen layout in the source code, to suit your own whims. eg Changed the format of the date: (Later, I changed the seconds to a smaller font as I think it's nicer that way) The software is very flexible and for example, you can elect to show the time in 12hr format.
Thanks also to WA2FZW and G3ZQC for fixing a couple of bugs in the original code. (The Github link on this page will be updated soon.)
VK3PE
This project is based on the excellent work by W8BH. Page created by vk3pe (QRZ.COM) on 30th Nov, 2020 |
