chrisw63 / matrixportalweatherplustime

Modified Adafruit MatrixPortal Weather to add Time.

MatrixPortalWeatherPlusTime

Modified Adafruit MatrixPortal Weather to add Time. For the original ADABOX 64x32 LED matrix and MatrixPortal M4 board. Follow the install instructions at https://learn.adafruit.com/weather-display-matrix, then replace code.py with this code.

Temperature and 24 hr clock are swapped every 10 seconds.

Most of the additions are in lines 107-120. The time update was reduced from 1 hour to 10 minutes to keep the clock accurate without calling network.get_local_time() every minute (and stalling the display). The only other additions to the code is the 'tunit' variable in the metric/imperial initialization section and dtemptime a couple lines before the main loop. Conversion to 12 hour time would be simple, but there's no room for an AM/PM indicator during double-digit hours, so I left it at 24 hr time.

Coding the first version, I believed the MatrixPortal didn't have a real time clock function. So I coded the minute and ten second counters using time.monotonic(). I knew it wasn't accurate, but I also knew calling network.get_local_time() stalls the display for several seconds - calling it every minute would be ugly and way overkill. The biggest time sink was drilling into openweather_graphics.py and testing live updates of the displayed text variables. While optimizing those and getting them to display correctly (apparently PortalBase does some formatting behind the scenes..), I finally saw it: rtime = rtc.RTC() Are you kidding me?? eesh... One whole section of the code wasn't needed any more, and optimizing the rest took no time at all.