Category: Projects

I’ve had a background project ticking over slowly in the background for a number of years.

Last year I designed and had built a number of PCBs to be used as HATs for a Raspberry Pi Zero. They included a RTC and a terminal block to attach the LED strip.

I did say that I would write another post when the boards where delivered and I had assembled the first prototype. Unfortunately I had made a small, but critical mistake when designing the boards, I slightly messed up the package package size for the RTC so it wasn’t possible to get assemble the boards correctly. I didn’t get round to re-doing the PCB layout with the correct sized parts so the whole thing just sat for a while.

In the meantime the Raspberry Pi Foundation went and released a new product, the Raspberry Pi Pico, which is based on the RP2040 chip. As well as the Pico they are also making the RP2040 chip available to other folk to include it directly in their own projects.

Pimoroni have created a number of different boards but their latest is the Plasma 2040 which is specifically designed to drive LED strips.

B.O.M.

• Pimoroni Plasma 2040
• Pimoroni LED strip cable adapter
• Pimoroni RV3028 Real-Time Clock Breakout
• Flexible RGB 60 LED per meter strip
• USB-C power supply
• USB-C cable

Assembly

• Solder the RTC on to the breakout section of the Plasma 2040, the terminals are labelled so just make sure you match up the pins, I used the headers that came with the RTC and arranged it so the breakout was over the top of the Plasma2040
• Loosen the screw terminals for the connections marked 5V, DA and -. Insert the Red wire of the adapter in the 5V, Green wire in DA and White wire in –
• Clip the LED strip to the end of the adapter.

Code

When you first attach the Plasma2040 to your computer it will show up as a USB flash drive. This is so you can install the runtime. In this case we’ll be using the Pimoroni Micropython build that comes with support for the board. You can grab a version from the release page on GitHub here. Once downloaded copy it into the root of the drive. When the copy has finished the board will reboot and be ready to run Python code.

You can use the Thonny IDE to both write and push code to the device. You will need at least version 3.3.3 to support the Plasma2040.

The fist version of the code was as follows:

import plasma
from plasma import plasma2040
from pimoroni import RGBLED, Button
import time

NUM_LEDS = 60
LOW = 32
MED = 64
HIGH = 128
BRIGHTNESS = [LOW,MED,HIGH]
BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL = 0

button_brightness = Button(plasma2040.BUTTON_A)

led = RGBLED(plasma2040.LED_R, plasma2040.LED_G, plasma2040.LED_B)
led.set_rgb(0, 0, 0)
led_strip = plasma.WS2812(NUM_LEDS, 0, 0, plasma2040.DAT)

led_strip.start()

while True:
    RED = [0]*NUM_LEDS
    GREEN = [0]*NUM_LEDS
    BLUE = [0]*NUM_LEDS
    t = time.localtime()

    hour = (t[3] % 12) * 5
    #Hours
    RED[hour] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
    RED[hour + 1] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
    RED[hour + 2] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
    RED[hour + 3] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
    RED[hour + 4] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
    #Mins
    GREEN[t[4]] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
    #Secs
    BLUE[t[5]] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
    
    #set the LEDS
    for i in range (NUM_LEDS):
        led_strip.set_rgb(i, RED[i], GREEN[i], BLUE[i])
    
    #change brightness
    if button_brightness.read():
        BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL += 1
        BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL %= 3
    
    time.sleep(1)
 

This works well when triggered from Thonny as it syncs the laptop’s time to the RP2040 each time it connects. But when the clock is powered by a USB power supply or a battery, the clock starts at 00:00:01 Jan 1st 2021 and has no way to be updated to match now.

This is why we need the RTC module, it keeps track of the time while the clock is powered down.

It also has a way to change the brightness, by pressing the A button it will cycle through 3 different brightness levels.

Setting the RTC Time

With a little bit of playing I worked out how to sync the RTC to the current time in the Thonny console

>>> from pimoroni_i2c import PimoroniI2C
>>> from breakout_rtc import BreakoutRTC
>>> import time
>>> PINS_PLASMA = {"sda": 20, "scl": 21}
>>> i2c = PimoroniI2C(**PINS_PLASMA)
>>> rtc = BreakoutRTC(i2c)
>>> rtc.set_unix(time.time())
>>> rtc.set_time(54,18,17,6,18,9,2021)
True
>>> rtc.update_time()
True
>>> print(rtc.string_time())
17:18:54
>>> rtc.set_backup_switchover_mode(3)

The most important line is the last one, which enables the battery backup for the RTC so it remembers the time you just set.

I was going to use the rtc.set_unix() function and pass in time.time() but it appears that the unix timestamp is maintained independently of the “Real” time on the RTC.

The set_time() function takes values in the order

• seconds (0-60)
• minutes (0-60)
• hours (0-23)
• day of the week (1-7 -> mon-sun)
• day of month (1-31)
• monthe (1-12)
• year (2000-2099)

With the RTC set correctly a small update to the code to read from the RTC rather than from the time object and we are good to go.

import plasma
from plasma import plasma2040
from pimoroni import RGBLED, Button
from pimoroni_i2c import PimoroniI2C
from breakout_rtc import BreakoutRTC
import time

PINS_PLASMA = {"sda": 20, "scl": 21}

i2c = PimoroniI2C(**PINS_PLASMA)
rtc = BreakoutRTC(i2c)

if rtc.is_12_hour():
    rtc.set_24_hour()

if rtc.update_time():
    print(rtc.string_time())
    print(rtc.string_date())

NUM_LEDS = 60
LOW = 32
MED = 64
HIGH = 128
BRIGHTNESS = [LOW,MED,HIGH]
BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL = 0

button_brightness = Button(plasma2040.BUTTON_A)

led = RGBLED(plasma2040.LED_R, plasma2040.LED_G, plasma2040.LED_B)
led.set_rgb(0, 0, 0)
led_strip = plasma.WS2812(NUM_LEDS, 0, 0, plasma2040.DAT)

led_strip.start()

rtc.enable_periodic_update_interrupt(True)

while True:
    RED = [0]*NUM_LEDS
    GREEN = [0]*NUM_LEDS
    BLUE = [0]*NUM_LEDS
    t = time.localtime()

    if rtc.read_periodic_update_interrupt_flag():
        rtc.clear_periodic_update_interrupt_flag()
         
        rtc.update_time()
        hour = (rtc.get_hours() % 12) * 5
        RED[hour] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
        RED[hour + 1] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
        RED[hour + 2] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
        RED[hour + 3] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
        RED[hour + 4] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
        GREEN[rtc.get_minutes()] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]
        BLUE[rtc.get_seconds()] = BRIGHTNESS[BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL]

        for i in range (NUM_LEDS):
            led_strip.set_rgb(i, RED[i], GREEN[i], BLUE[i])
        
        if button_brightness.read():
            BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL += 1
            BRIGHTNESS_LEVEL %= 3
    
    time.sleep(1)

Next Steps

There are a few things that need doing next. The first is to build a case for the clock, I’m thinking about something made up of layers of thin plywood with a channel for the LED strip and maybe a layer of smoked/mat acrylic to act as a diffuser.

The second part is to work out a way to work with DST, Micropython doesn’t support timezones as the database needed to keep track of all the different timezones takes up a huge amount of space. I could hard code in the dates for my location, but I’ll probably just make use of the B button to toggle an hours difference on/off.

Optionally I might add another 31 LED strip (probably at 30/meter) to be used as a calendar showing the current month with markers for weekends and the current day.

Another option is to use 4 of these to build a 60 LED ring for something a little more conventionally shaped.

And the final extra hack is to daisy chain the Light level sensor (e.g. one of these) on top of the RTC and dynamically adjust the brightness based on ambient light levels.

I’ll also probably keep tinkering with the Raspberry Pi Zero W version as that will allow oAuth to link to things like Google Calendar to show meetings in the clock view and add Holidays to the Calendar view. It will also have access to the full timezone database and NTP for time syncing over the network.