mikethegent/dual_clock

Accurate clock using GPS for time and two displays.

Dual_Clock

This is a work in progress although I have a working clock.

Clock with two displays -- a big red HT16K33 which is easy to read from many angles and a smaller TFT to display temperature, humidity etc. The clock uses a Neo 7M GPS receiver to get a very accurate time.

The clock is still in developent and not all features are complete. At the moment, accurate time is displayed once the GPS receiver has a fix.

The time zone info in TimeSource.cpp can be edited to suit different time zones.

Many mods are possible to suit different hardware.

The version I am building uses a Waveshare ESP32 S3 Zero MCU. This is slight overkill, but it a nice small package. The code could probably be made to work in a much cheaper D1 Mini with an ESP8266.

Much more info to follow. Questions welcome.

Code

As an experiment, I implemented everything using namespaces instead of classes. I'd heard some harsh criticism of OOP and wanted to experiment with the alternatives. I actually prefer this approach when there is only going to one instance of a thing. The code seems to be shorter and easier to understand. Each namespace is decoupled from the others -- everything is tied together in main.cpp.

The code is written in, and designed for, vscode & PlatformIO. A bit of moving & renaming of main.cpp would probably be all that's needed to compile it in Arduino IDE. But why?

platformio.ini is configured for an adafruit_feather_esp32s3 which is the closest I could find to the spec of my Waveshare ESP32 S3 Zero. These boards both have 4Mb RAM unlike other S3 boards which have 8Mb. It took a while to figure out why the MCU was crashing.

Parts

Find the Parts List in the Wiki

WiFi & Alexa

Dual Clock uses the WiFiManager library to get WiFi credentials obviating the need for hard coded SSID & password.

By default, the clock connects to WiFi and emulates a Phillips bulb using the fauxmoESP library. The brightness can be adjusted and the displays turned off using Alexa. This feature can be easily removed in main.cpp.

Case

You can download my case design from the Wiki

TFT_eSPI configutation

Move resources/User_Setup.h to your TFT_eSPI directory which will be somwhere in .pio/libdeps. You will need to edit this file to suit your MCU & TFT unless you are using exactly the same devices as me.