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I got this idea for a while but I never had the chance to try it out. Friday, a workmate gave me a LCD shield for Arduino and I thought that was the right time to build a clock that comunicate the time through QR-codes. Of course, it’s extremely useless (as most of the clocks nowadays).
In the video below you can see the clock booting up and loading 3 different qr-codes (3 minutes)
Step 2: The software
In order to make the clock to work we need some software on the pc and some on the arduino. All the needed code is in the 3 zip files attached to this step.
- On the pc a python script will check every minute the time, search in the img folder the right QR-code that represent the time and send the pixel trough the serial line.
- If you want to change the format of the qr-codes shown you can use the bash script to re-download the images (for example I use 24h time format. You could prefer the 12h one). I use google infographic service to produce the qr-codes. It’s super fast and doesn’t ban my IP also after a lot of requests.
Major Components in Project
The hardware
In order to build a QR-clock you need:
- Arduino UNO
- Color LCD & Joystick shield for Arduino
- USB cable for arduino
- A computer
Actually you can substitute my LCD shield with wathever LCD shield you have. You will need to adapt the code using the libraries of your shield.
For more detail: The useless but mazing QR-clock using Arduino
