If you’ve followed my Instagram recently (and lets face it, no you haven’t) you might have noticed these cryptic posts with imagery of a pile of electronics with some enormous 7-segment displays strewn on top (see exhibit A)
What I’ve been working on is a long term dream of mine, a clock that never needs you to set the time, thanks to the fact that it updates itself using the NTP system over the Internet. A big part of this stems from childhood trauma from DCF77 receiving clocks (only a German could think of broadcasting time with an offset from UTC with a signal strong enough to cover most of Europe) and a decade of my life in the IT industry, where incorrect time is altogether a too common root cause of issues (it should be indistinguishable from 0 in 2017 one would think).
I’ve currently worked out the hardware for the basic clock, and will be doing a more thorough post about this project as I manage to finalise it, but as there seems to be very little information on the topic on the Internet, I though someone else might be looking for just this thing at this very moment, and so that you don’t have to work out everything from different sources as I did, here’s a link to my GitHub project, where you can download the code actually works!
https://github.com/grumpytechie/ntpclock
The GitHub will eventually host all the steps to getting this to work, but with a glancing understanding of electronics and Raspberry Pis you should be able to make it work (hey, after all, I managed to cobble it all together, didn’t I?).
I’ll be back in a few weeks as I finalise the enclosure as well as the power supply!
Categories: Raspberry Pi, Tech
Grumpy Techie 
Leave a Reply