Raspberry Pi Time Clock: Gaugette Time Clock #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Here’s a great project using a bunch of Adafruit gear, as well as Occidentalis v0.2 and the Adafruit Fritzing library to solve a common freelancers challenge: it provides a visual reminder as to when you are recording your time spent on one project or another. This rather nice implementation might fit as happily on a lawyer’s desk as a coder’s or engineer’s! From Guy Carpenter.

This build combines a Raspberry Pi with a rotary-encoder, an RGB LED and an OLED character display to create a time clock that logs my time on tasks directly to a Google Docs spreadsheet.

Motivation

Whenever I have to record time against projects, I find it really hard to diligently keep my time records up to date. Maybe with a purpose-built time clock I will keep better records? Maybe.

Overview

The off-the-shelf components:

Raspberry Pi model B Rev 1 – Adafruit has the Rev 2 board.

128×32 SPI OLED display – Adafruit

Rotary Encoder – Adafruit

5mm RGB LED – Sparkfun

Occidentalis 0.2 – Adafruit

6” Female/Female jumper wires – Adafruit

3” Female/Female jumpers wires – Little Bird Electronics or Adafruit

I used a common cathode LED from Sparkfun. You could use Adafruit’s common anode equivalent with minor code changes.

The theory of operation is pretty simple:

at start-up, it pulls a list of jobs from a Google Docs spreadsheet,

rotating the knob scrolls through the list of jobs,

clicking the knob logs a start time or end time in the spreadsheet….

Featured Adafruit Products

Raspberry Pi Model B 512MB RAM: The Raspberry Pi® is a single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. The design is based around a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and 128 or 256 Megabytes of RAM. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for booting and long-term storage. This board is intended to run Linux kernel based operating systems. This is the Raspberry Pi Model B 512MB RAM model with two USB ports and a 10/100 Ethernet controller. (read more)

Monochrome 128×32 SPI OLED graphic display: These displays are small, only about 1″ diagonal, but very readable due to the high contrast of an OLED display. This display is made of 128×32 individual white OLED pixels, each one is turned on or off by the controller chip. Because the display makes its own light, no backlight is required. This reduces the power required to run the OLED and is why the display has such high contrast; we really like this miniature display for its crispness! (read more)

Rotary Encoder + Extras: This rotary encoder is the best of the best, its a high quality 24-pulse encoder, with detents and a nice feel. It is panel mountable for placement in a box, or you can plug it into a breadboard (just cut/bend the two mechanical side tabs.) We also include a nice soft-touch knob with an arrow in it, fits perfectly and looks great. This encoder also has a push-button built into it so you can press onto the knob to close a separate switch. One side has a 3 pin connector (ground and two coding pins) and the other side has two pins for a normally-open switch. (read more)

Occidentalis v0.2: This is our second distro, Occidentalis v0.2. Rubus occidentalis is the black raspberry. It is derived from Raspbian Wheezy August 16. We have made a few key changes to make it more hardware-hacker friendly! (read more)

Premium Female/Female Jumper Wires – 40 x 6″: Handy for making wire harnesses or jumpering between headers on PCB’s. These premium jumper wires are a little over 6″ (150mm) long and come in a ‘strip’ of 40 (4 pieces of each of ten colors). They have 0.1″ sockets on either end and fit cleanly next to each other on standard-pitch 0.1″ (2.54mm) header. We recentlty updated these so they are in a ‘ribbon strip’ instead of individual wires. You can always pull the ribbon wires off to make individual jumpers, or keep them together to make neatly organized wire harnesses. (read more)

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.