We love hearing what our customers are doing and sharing it, so others can get ideas and information.

Recently, we heard from Howie, who designed a clock to provide Network Time Protocol (NTP) synchronized Universal Coordinated Time along with six other time zones. He even managed to get his uber clock to show a line of text scrolling at the bottom. You can change the text by sending an email to the clock, which is a super nice touch.

Three of Embedded Adventures LDP-6432 tri-colour panels and a PLT-1001v4 driver board are controlled by a Raspberry Pi board programmed in Python. Howie says that having a full Linux operating system made the whole process fairly easy: “A configuration file makes it easy to select which six time zones you want to use without having to modify the base program.”

An email account was created for the clock to use as a source of the scrolling text. The Raspberry Pi checks its email account on a regular basis and passes the messages to the Python program.

Unfortunately, Howie said that he couldn't use the built-in scroll feature because he couldn't update the clock readout while scrolling the text. So, he wrote a routine in in the Python code that puts the message into a buffer that and steps through the buffer every display refresh cycle. This allows a network monitor system to send alerts to a clock in the NOC. 

On startup, the Python program gets the assigned IP address and displays it in the text area for 20 seconds before beginning the program. This allows a user to find the clock's DHCP address and make an SSH connection to it from a remote terminal to make configuration changes.

Howie so kindly said, “The Embedded Adventures displays and driver module were very easy to work with once I got passed the initial learning curve. Thanks for all your help and great support. I will be ordering more stuff soon.”

Let us know what you're working on!