pi-watch

Introduction

I recently came across an IO board from Pimoroni called Pirate Audio: Speaker for Raspberry Pi. This audio board has a small 1.3" (240x240) IPS LCD display & a 1W speaker. The display has an SPI interface and uses the st7789 controller module & the audio is controlled by the onboard MAX98357A DAC chip.

It fits perfectly on a RaspberryPi Zero and I instantly thought of building something with it - maybe a modern day clock radio - at-least for Mark-I. I hope to convert this project into something more important than just a dumb clock trying to wake you up every morning by playing songs from your favorite stations on the internet radio/streaming service.

Hardware

• Pirate Audio: Speaker for Raspberry Pi - Depending on your use case, you can select from a variety of IO options.
• Raspberry Pi - Zero has the best form factor for this board, but you can use any other Pi for it.
• 5V, 2A Power Supply Unit - I'm using the official Raspberry Pi power supply unit, but you can use one of your preference.
• Raspberry Pi Case - I'm using a clear-top case by AdaFruit Industries but there are a lot of other good options available depending on your use-case.
• Micro-SD Card - I'm using a 32GB Class 3 SD Card, but if you want a better performance, you should use a Class 10 or higher SD-card.

Installation

I'm going to assume that you already have a working pi set-up with your choice of OS & is fully updated. If not, refer to this article to get started. Now, to be able to run this program you'll need to set the following few things up on your Pi:

• Python-3 - All Pi OS's come with Python2 (unless you're using a LITE version, in which case you'll only get bare-metal OS files) which is now EOL & this app was written in Python3.
  • To install Python-3 on your pi you need to do the following:

    sudo apt-get install python3
    

  • After you've installed python, you'll need to a few other libraries as a pre-requisite to the display driver module we'll install later:

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install python3-rpi.gpio python3-spidev python3-pil python3-numpy
    

• Git - To be able to clone the project initially & to pull any future updates and/or bug fixes.

  sudo apt-get install git
  

• ST7789 Display Module - This is the driver for the display attached to the hat we're using.

  sudo pip3 install ST7789
  

  *This is an SPI based display, so you'll also need to enable I2C & SPI channels on your Pi. You can do this by changing 'Interface Options' in raspi-config (sudo raspi-config)
  
  
• OpenWeatherMaps Developer Access - It's free to use for non-commercial purposes, but you do need to signup for developer access. Once done, you'll need to update your api-key in the properties file. (I'll integrate secrets at a later point to keep this separate & secure)
  

Running the Application

Now that we've set everything up, its time to get the app & run it on your pi.

• Get the app using git:

   git clone https://github.com/gagansopori/pi-watch.git
  

• Run the main.py file using commandline:

   python3 /{location-to-your-project}/main.py
  

• If you want to run this app upon startup you can use linux's crontab feature:
  • From your teminal use the command below to open the crontab in edit mode:

    crontab -e
    

  • Set up the task to run everytime you reboot at the bottom of the file.

    @reboot python3 /{location-to-your-project}/main.py 
    

  • Save the file as-is, exit the editor & reboot your pi.

That's it. Your clock is ready to go. I will post more & update this readme as add more functionalities to this project as I keep on developing.