Briget: Clock and Personnel Assistant

[Disparia]

I have an Raspberry Pi 3B+ sitting for another project, but that won't happen until I get my hands on the official Pi PoE hat (coming "soon").

Instead, let's put this unproductive Pi in an old clock, get the time, and then work on a personnel assistant with reduced spying on the user!

What I have,

- Raspberry Pi 3B+ (32GB SD)
- USB to SATA adapter (remains of a shucked external drive)
- Crucial 128GB M4 SSD
- Old clock... I do not remember why I have it
- My wife while learning Python found a base project to fork. It already has features such analog or digital faces, local weather, etc. Goal is to add and enhance.


What I do not have yet,

- New "clock face", a ~7" LCD screen (HDMI or Pi ribbon)

- Pi Camera


First, the housing need a little work. It will need a bath in Murphy's Oil Soap.







After taking it down to bits, the bathing, and the drying; it's time to start from the bottom up.



Cheap bonding agent dries quickly and guarantees your product will fall apart after the warranty. Basic everyday yellow wood glue will take about 2 hours per surface to cure, but it takes a sledge to destroy the end result.

Future posts: More wood, hardware, and software.

 

[Disparia]

Coming along...




I looked up adapters that would allow both RPI Camera and NoIR modules to be hooked up at the same time. The board I found available justifies it's price by being able to handle four cameras. That's nice for sure, but since the maximum I want on Briget is two, I'm leaning towards the IoT approach.

Better in the long run since security/night nodes* would be a future goal regardless of Briget having this capability locally.

*Need a name for these types of nodes:

• Pi Zero + NoIR Camera module
• eyes in the dark
• placed out of the way
• not for 2-way user communication (Bridget is the initial and unique interface; different, future nodes will have the purpose be being generic interfaces)

The hardware side isn't set is in stone, as a better combo may emerge a couple months from now. The idea though, will always there.

Limited in scoped and more of a template so I don't want to use specific character names: Batman, Raven.

Even with additional senors such as temperature, you don't waste the big ones at the beginning of a project: Daleks, The Watchers.

Dark, just starting out, burrowed... Zerglings?!

 

[Disparia]

The top is next, then clean up, and part placement, etc. A bit slow going this week as there's been quite a bit of rain, every day.

 

[Disparia]

Needed to buy a new mouse so the screen/camera is delayed a few. Doesn't mean I can't put a little work into the services in the mean time.

The other clock project used Weather Undergrounds old interface; the radar and forecast data is missing:



I've been looking at DarkSky as a replacement. Signup is free, along with 1000 calls a day. Can schedule an update every 10 minutes, only taking a fraction of the call budget. The code is dead simple:

$json = file_get_contents("https://api.darksky.net/forecast/$secretKey/$latitude,$longitude");
file_put_contents('weather.json', $json);

Just grab and store locally. It'll be easy to bring into PHP, Python, etc, and access it as needed. For example, the current temp (and feels like):

$json = file_get_contents('weather.json');
$weather = json_decode($json);

echo $weather->currently->temperature;
//89.45

echo $weather->currently->apparentTemperature;
//97.29

Will also be able to use their maps and overlay data which includes the usual options such as temperature and humidity. There's also emoji for times when such a mode is needed: