Life clock

A clock I built to accompany my niece through life. It greets you differently everyday and tells you how old you are. Example output:

Hello X,

Today you are 3 years and 45 days old.
Have a speedy day.

The greetings span English, German, and Russian’s full dictionary of ~55,000 words. So there are enough adjectives for ~153 years.

case

project case

case

• craftcloud3d
• hubs enclosure tips
• adafruit 3d printing tips

hardware

Selected once again because it’s cheap, powerful, and can be programmed with CircuitPython, is the Raspberry Pi Pico micro-controller.

pico ar

For the eink screen I went with Adafruit’s 2.13" Monochrome eInk because of the okay price and great documentation. It also includes an micro SD card reader on the back which came in handy to store the list of adjectives used in the project.

eink screen

To tell time I soldered in a DS3132 real time clock breakout board. In the future I’d like to find a cheaper alternative perhaps buying just the DS3132 IC itself and working with that instead of the Adafruit breakout board.

hardware development

hardware dev talk

bread board

oscilloscope

fixed signal

proto board installed in case

software development

source code

software dev talk

final product

whats next

With over a year in development this project has been a long time coming. A note for others out there working on personal hardware projects, it’s fine to set it down you can always come back to it. When you do finish it feels that much better.

Now that this project is done I’m excited to try hacking together a custom kids toy and helping my partner customize her espresso machine.