Software user

The WiFiChron GPS-synchronized clock was begging for some documentation on the menu options and some details on its features. Here they are. The GPS-WiFiChron uses TinyGPS library to read the time from NMEA sentences  (specifically GPRMC and GPGGA strings) from the uBlox Neo GPS module . The clock starts reading the data from the GPS module (using SoftwareSerial library, receiving on pin D7) 2 minutes after power up. Once a valid GPRMC or GPGGA sentence is received, the minutes and seconds (but not the hours) are automatically re-set from the satellite UTC time. The successful synchronization is indicated by the "up arrow" at the end of the scrolling date (e.g. Sunday August 21, 2016 ^). In order to automatically set the hours as well, I added a new menu option, GPS? (Yes/No) . When this is selected (set to "Yes"), the local hour is calculated based on the longitude, by estimating the timezone using a simple formula: // estimate time zone from longitude; int8_t g...

The challenge was to add GPS to this "basic LED matrix clock". Since I don't see the point of a GPS clock that does not show seconds, I had to figure out how to fit 6 digits on the 8x16 LED matrix. One way to do it is this: as used by the " Matrix Clock V1.0 ". Kind of hard to distinguish between 0 and 8 though. Another way is based on MixiClock , where 4 digits are crammed in a 8x8 (tri-color) matrix. (This was more than 4 years ago. Incredible how little progress I made since.) As for the name, I settled for "Mondrian" because  Kandinsky  was already taken :) The hours are shown in red, the minutes in green and the seconds in orange. After power up, the seconds blink until the GPS time is received (less than 5 minutes in my house, more than 3 meters away from the nearest window). Only the minutes and the seconds are synchronized (but not the hours). The Mondrian clock is made of 2 boards: the wsduino with the GPS Bee plugged in (and the antenna aff...

The latest release of the Wise Clock 4 software can be found here . It includes a few new features: support for the XBee-fied ESP8266 (from iteadstudio), courtesy of MikeM; The WiFi settings are configured in the SD card file message.txt , and they look like this: #### ESP8266 configuration # # Esp8266.ssid Wireless SSID to connect to # Esp8266.phrase pass phrase to use (WPA authentication) # Esp8266.sntp optional SNTP server IP address (not hostname) for time synchronization # Esp8266.rssurl optional URL of an RSS feed, like http://w1.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KMYF.rss Esp8266.ssid   BELL475 Esp8266.phrase 7xyz1E9F6 Esp8266.sntp    Esp8266.rssurl  This feature is enabled in the code by the following line in file  UserConf.h : #define WANT_ESP8266 support for GPSBee  (from seeedstudio): only the minutes and seconds are set from the GPS data, the hours remain as set from the buttons; synchronization is performed once a day and/or when the clock is ...