Published April 24, 2017 © GPL3+

Clock - Grove 4-digit Display Using Photon

Your first clock with 4 components, based on Grove and TM1637.

BeginnerShowcase (no instructions)1 hour3,418

Clock - Grove 4-digit Display Using Photon

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Particle Photon

Seeed Studio Base Shield for Photon

Seeed Studio 4 Digit Display

Seeed Studio Grove - Universal 4 PIN Jumper

1 to connect the Display

Story

Instructions

Use the Particle IDE and add a library named TM1637Display to the code attached.

No schematics necessary: put the cable into D2 on the Base Shield and other side into the Display - its one way.

Flash the code - be happy with your first red colored clock on a 7 segment display. You can customize the brightness in setup and center colon (blink or constant).

The Equipment

The photon used included functions to get the time. Top hardware like an RTC is not necessary. The summary costs are round about $23.

The determined time is made available in an array by the mathematical modulo function (residual value determination), and thus assigned to the individual digits (counted from the left 0-3 instead of 1-4).

TM1637 presents a clock

// tested with Photon, firmware v0.6.1

#include <TM1637Display.h>

#define CLK D4
#define DIO D5

TM1637Display displayTime(CLK,DIO);

void setup() {
    displayTime.setBrightness(0xff); //set the diplay to maximum brightness
//    displayTime.setBrightness(0x0a); //not so bright
    Time.zone(+2.00);  // setup a time zone, which is part of the ISO6801 format 
}



void loop() {
    int h = Time.hour();
    int m = Time.minute();

    // Set center colon on without array - Start
    uint8_t segto;
    int value = 1244;
    segto = 0x80 | displayTime.encodeDigit((value / 100)%10); // And off will be without this 0x80 bit set
    displayTime.setSegments(&segto, 1, 1);
    //delay(1000) ; // constant colon
    // End

    // Print Data array - Start
    uint8_t data[] = {0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff};
    
      data[0] = displayTime.encodeDigit(h / 10);
      data[1] = displayTime.encodeDigit(h % 10) | (Time.second() % 2 ? 0x80 : 0x00);
      data[2] = displayTime.encodeDigit(m / 10);
      data[3] = displayTime.encodeDigit(m % 10);
      displayTime.setSegments(data);

}