nvrtd.design Blog

 Whereabouts Clock (v6) When I published the last update to the Whereabouts Clock I knew that I would make another version that simplified the architecture.  Apple iOS supports the idea of location regions (home, work, etc.) and can notify an App when the user enters and exits a region.  This "presence" feature is utilized in Life360, OwnTracks, and others. Instead of looking up a user's location from a static database, we can leverage the built-in feature to tell the Arduino clock how to move and when.  There's no more polling a web page for updates or maintaining a database of locations. So how does the whole system work now? Devices with OwnTracks send location data (either standard location messages or transition events into/out of a known region) to the MQTT broker (Mosquitto).   These messages contain the region information setup on the device (more on that in a minute) The Mosquitto MQTT broker broadcasts these messages to its subscribers (other OwnT...

I saw this design on Thingiverse a few weeks ago.  I believe it was also featured in Make Magazine's blog.   Mechanical 7-segment Display, simple and smooth It's such a cool design that I had to make a clock out of it.  Note that the designer, Shinsaku Hiura , also has a full clock made from another of his designs.  I printed out 4 copies of the design using Hatchbox and Overture PLA.  Instead of painting just the faces of the moving arms I chose to print the entire part in white.  The movement is controlled by 4x 9-gram servos .  I had a leftover  Arduino Nano  to control the system.  The time is read from a  DS3231 real-time clock module  and a momentary pushbutton switch is used to switch between the clock and the date.  The switch triggers an interrupt in the code and makes the clock change the display to the date (MM / DD) format for 5 seconds before reverting back to the time in 24-hour format.  The clock ...