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Dual clock display

A project log for Raspberry Pi Zero W desk clock

An LED desk clock driven by NTP on a Pi Zero W

nick-sayerNick Sayer 07/18/2017 at 19:450 Comments

I haven't actually done this, but I've been considering how to make a dual display variant, perhaps as a display piece for an astronomical museum - one display could show LAST, the other standard time.

To do this, you're going to probably have to come up with some new mounting / case scheme, obviously.

But electrically it's fairly straightforward. Assemble the first clock as usual, with a pi zero w. This display will be display 0.

Next, build an identical board, but leave the 40 pin GPIO header off. You'll be using 5 jumper wires to connect from this board to the GPIO header on the other board (actually, on the Pi that's connected to it). This will be display 1.

The connections required:

Board 0Board 1Function
22+5
66GND
1919MOSI
2323SCK
2624CE1 -> CE0

Thusly connected, the second board will take power from the first, and share the SPI bus. The two clocks will keep out of each other's way by using different nodes in /dev. You simply need to run two different clock daemons, with one of them using /dev/spidev0.0 (for the display connected directly to the pi), and the other using /dev/spidev0.1 (for the auxiliary display).

You do need to make sure your +5 volt power supply is beefy enough. You should count on at least supplying 500 mA.

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