Normal view
10 bargraphs and progressbars for the LCD of the Arduino
There is a total of 10 different bars and here are the two which are used in the upcoming version of the Multi face GPS Clock.
The main design principle is that no more than 8 custom characters should be required per bar. That means that the custom character set is uploaded just once for each bar, giving much less probability for wearing out the LCD character memory with its presumed finite limit on the number of write cycles.ΒThis excludes some fancier bars that require more or less continuous updates of character sets during progression of the bar.
The code and images of the other eight bars can be found onΒ Github.
Multi Face GPS Clock ver 2.0 setup
A brief press on the rotary encoder will enter the setup menu with these options:
< 0 Clock subset >, < 1 Backlight >, < 2 Date format >, < 3 Time zone >, < 4 Local language >, <5 Secondary menu>.
Submenus will lead the user to :Β
- Menu 0: Clock subset, gives a choice between Favorites (24 screens), All (40 screens), Calendar (13), Fancy clocks (22), Astronomy (16), Radio amateur (13)
- Menu 2, Date format, gives a choice between EU, US, ISO, French, British, Period format, Dot format
- Menu 3: 20 different time zones
- Menu 4: English (en), French (fr), German (de), Norwegian (no), Spanish (es) day names for local time
- Secondary menus will enable a choice of among others GPS baud rate
Chosen values will be stored in EEPROM so next time the clock is started it will start with the values used in the previous session.
A long press will reset the clock.
The code can be found on Github.
Clock cycles through chemical elements
This is screen number 39 for this clock, all of them selectable by rotating a rotary encoder. The project, with Arduino Mega hardware and software is documented on Github, where the current release is v.1.6.0 (2023-04-14).
The display also showsΒ the full name for the element corresponding to the second, as shown above for element 3 which is Lithium. It is located in group (column) 1 and period (row) 2.
Planet positions for the Multi Face GPS Clock
- Azimuth and elevation for inner and outer planets relative to your present location. The inner planet screen shows Venus and Mercury and alternates also every 10 seconds between showing the position of the sun and the moon. The % illumination is also shown along with an estimate of apparent magnitude
- The combined local time and UTC display now has an option to show ISO week number, defined to start on Mondays. (It is my understanding that the week number in the US is different, as Sunday is the first day of the week)
- A new calendar screen now shows Gregorian (western), Julian (eastern) as well as Islamic and Jewish dates. The calculation of the Jewish calendar is tough for the Arduino Mega and takes some 5-6 seconds
- A screen showing GPS Info has also been included. This screen shows the number of satellites in view (line 0), the number of satellites in use for position fix and their average signal to noise ratio (line 1), the mode and status indicators (line 2), and the Horizontal Dilution of Precision, Hdop, and its characterization in plain text (line 3).
- Planet code is based on arduino_planet_ephi_positions.
- Calendars are based on code from Dershowitz and Rheingold adapted for the Arduino
French, Spanish, German, Icelandic, Swedish, ...
The multi-face Arduino GPS clock is inspired by the Clock Kit from QRPLabs. It is an open source project on GitHub, and it now has support for many more languages in the newly released versjon 1.4.0. As a language nerd myself, I love fiddling with multiple languages and character sets.
The local language option is for display of day name in case local time is shown. The default is English for local time. No matter the choice for local time, English is always used for UTC day name. Here are examples:
French:
Even more functions for the Arduino GPS Clock
- Demo mode, where all screens are cycled through, with 10-15 seconds per screen
- Astronomical clock
- Wordclock display
- Roman numbers
- Morse code clock
- A sideral year is one day shorter than a solar year, as noon is defined when the earth points in a particular direction relative to the stars rather than to the sun. Further explanation is here: sidereal time
- Apparent solar time has noon when the sun is exactly to the South. It takes into account the shift due to daylight saving time, the shift due to my longitude relative to the 15 degree zone per hour, as well as irregularities in the Earth's orbit around the sun. See solar time here.
Presentation at Hammeeting 2022
Main links for documentation
- Github:Β Multi Face GPS Clock
- Documentation on this blog: Arduino clock
Ham meeting 2022
The Norwegian Ham meeting 2022 will take place 11-13 March near Oslo Airport Gardermoen. Norwegian and some Swedish radio amateurs will meet and the program is here (Norwegian). It will be nice finally to meet again!
I will give a presentation on Saturday morning: "An easy-to-build GPS clock for the shack".
More functions for the Arduino GPS Clock
- Additions only
- Also subtraction
- Also multiplication
- and finally subtraction, multiplication, and divisionΒ
Β Β
There is a new simpler look for a screen showing rise and set times for the sun according to Actual Civil, and Nautical sunrise/set with definitions 0, -6, and -12 degrees below the horizon.Β
Β
Updated Arduino Multi Face GPS Clock
The GPSClock from last month has now been updated and software version 1.10 1.1.0 is available on Github. The main upgrade is the possibility to use a rotary encoder for selecting display screen or clock face.
In addition a new screen showing Easter for the next three years, according to both the Gregorian (Western) and Julian (Eastern) calendars, has been added as number 22. The dates are shown in the Gregorian calendar:
Multi Face GPS Clock published
Version 1 of my Multi Face GPS Clock is here, as open source software for the Arduino Mega. It has some 22Β 19 different display screens showing time, location, solar and lunar positions and rise/set times. It shows UTC time as received from the GPS satellites and local time where it automatically adjust for summer time. The initial screen, no. 0, is this:
The display changes by pushing the right-hand pushbutton on the top, increasing the screen number by one. Similarly the number can be decreased by pushing the left-hand push-button. The potentiometer on the right side adjust the backlight. The clock is built on the same hardware as used for the K3NG Arduino CW keyer.
The date and time formats may be changed, and with US settings it looks like this:
- FEATURE_LCD_I2CΒ - I2C interface to LCD
- FEATURE_LCD_4BIT - parallel interface to 20x4 LCDΒ
- FEATURE_DAY_NAME_NATIVE - to use local language day names for local time
- SECONDS_CLOCK_HELP - to set the number of seconds per minute when time is shown in a normal format in the Binary, BCD, etc displays. Values from 0 (never) to 60 (always)
- DATEORDER = 'L': Little-endian:Β 22.04.2016 or 22.04 - EU
- DATEORDER = 'M': Middle-endian:Β 04/22/2016 or 04/22 - US
- DATEORDER = 'B': Big-endian:Β Β Β 2016-04-22 or 04-22 - ISO
- DATE_SEP = '.'; // Alternatives: '.', '/', 'β', ' ', ...
- HOUR_SEP = ':'; // Alternatives: ':', '.', 'h', ...
- MIN_SEPΒ = ':'; // Alternatives: ':', '.', 'm', ...Β
- TimeLib.h - timekeeping functionality
- Timezone_Generic.h - for time zones and automatic handling of daylight saving
- TinyGPS++.h - for GPS data interpretationΒ
- Sunrise.hΒ - for predicting sun rise/set times
- sunpos.h - solar position, taken from the K3NG rotator controller
- moon2.h - lunar position fromΒ K3NG rotator controllerΒ Β
- lunarcycle.c - has been adapted for Arduino and is included in the code
Finally figured out the moon
Finally, over the last few weeks I managed to adapt lunarCycle.c to Arduino and get it to work as shown in the display here. My ambition is now eventually to publish this project on GitHub as Iβve had several requests for it.
The display here shows local time and date, moon phase on line 2, present moon elevation and moon azimuth on line 3, and the next rise time of the moon and at which position on the final line. Follow label βArduino clockβ below for more posts about this clock.