Fresh from Ponoko, it all fits! |
I wanted to make something practical, colourful and easily shown off to anyone coming through my door and portable enough to take places. I settled on using 12 RGB LEDs to tell the time with colour and brightness.
How does my clock tell time? The current hour is Magenta. All other hours are a background Green, except those that tell current Minutes and Seconds. Minutes move through green-yellow-RED-yellow-green. The bright RED occurs at each exact 5 minute interval. Seconds move from green -> cyan -> BLUE -> cyan ->green. The bright BLUE occurs at each 5 second interval. Fairly easy to get the hang of it. Not so easy to describe. Here is an example showing the time as 9:05:24.
Blender render of the partial clock assembly. |
I learned to use Blender to create 3D renders of my clock assembly. I imported the same Inkscape .svg files that I created for the laser cut parts and modified them for 3D. A bit of a learning curve but possible for guy who turns 70 next week.
I also have a repository for my updated Solar Monitor Project which is being done in collaboration with Anthony.
The current version of the Solar Monitor uses an 1.8" 18-bit color TFT LCD display with microSD card breakout and a DS1307 Real Time Clock breakout board kit, both sourced from Adafruit.
1.8' TFT display |
The TFT LCD, a sample screenshot shown here, displays (top to bottom):
- (text): battery voltage and current
- (graph): battery current for the last 100 seconds (positive and negative)
- (graph): integrated current for the last few hours (positive and negative)
- (text): date and time
- (bar graph): battery "percent charged" for the last few days
The monitor also logs the battery current and voltage, integrated for one second, on a micro SD card. Over time a power profile will develop which can used to determine patterns of appliance usage and specific appliance power consumption. All this from one current sensor with a timestamp I hope. A Bayes network looms.