My Doctor Who MonoChron Clock

[DanSlage]

I am working on a Doctor Who inspired clock for the MonoChron. A video can be seen here. http://youtu.be/DHecR3Matss

The TARTIS travels through an wiggly wormhole. Pressing a button or switch (except "Menu") will cause the TARTIS to dematerialize and rematerialize a moment later in a random spot. My daughter plans on using this as her primary alarm clock once I figure out how to replace the alarm siren with the Doctor Who theme song.

I had to rewrite the wormhole code a few times to get it fast enough render correctly. The GLCD.h drawing routines are way too slow instead the wormhole uses glcdDataWrite()s directly to draw everything.

To speed things up I also EXTERMINATEd all division and modulus operations. For example to separate the hour into a high digit and low digit:

Traditional

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high_digit = hour/10;
low_digit = hour%10;


I found this to be much faster

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high_digit = 0;
low_digit = hour;
while (low_digit >= 10) {  // Count tens
  high_digit++;
  low_digit -= 10;
}

When you have as much motion as this clock does every clock cycle counts.

[adafruit_support_bill]

Nice one! You should post this in this thead too:
http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=14769

[odometer]

What datatype is "hour"?

This is good up to 99:

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high_digit = 0;
low_digit = something;
if (low_digit >= 60) {high_digit += 6; low_digit -= 60;}
if (low_digit >= 30) {high_digit += 3; low_digit -= 30;}
if (low_digit >= 20) {high_digit += 2; low_digit -= 20;}
if (low_digit >= 10) {high_digit += 1; low_digit -= 10;}


[DanSlage]

Nice Odometer! The datatype is uint8_t but never goes larger than 59 in my program. My gut tells me your code would be faster than mine. I wonder if anyone has ever done any speed trials.

[Nicodemus_NJ]

I hate to be "that guy" but... It's TARDIS! (Time and Relative Dimension in Space)

[kscharf]

I am working on a Doctor Who inspired clock for the MonoChron. A video can be seen here. http://youtu.be/DHecR3Matss

My daughter plans on using this as her primary alarm clock once I figure out how to replace the alarm siren with the Doctor Who theme song.

Sounds like you need to interface a wave shield to the clock some how.

[JakeS]

Hi-

Saw your project featured in the Adafruit blog- nice!

We did a Dr. Who song through a piezo speaker an on Arduino. I used an existing program for the piezo frequencies and sound generation, which I have forgotten and can't attribute, sorry! We only figured out the melody and the timing.

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const int  b=     4056;    // 261 Hz
const int  c=     3830;    // 261 Hz
const int  d=     3400;    // 294 Hz
const int  e=     3038;    // 329 Hz
const int  f=     2864;    // 349 Hz
const int  g=     2550;    // 392 Hz
const int  a=     2272;    // 440 Hz
const int  B=     2028;    // 493 Hz
const int  C=     1912;    // 523 Hz
const int  D=     1700;    // 523 Hz
const int  E=     1508;    // 523 Hz
const int  F=     1432;    // 523 Hz
const int  G=     1278;    // 523 Hz
const int  A=     1136;    // 523 Hz
// Define a special note, 'R', to represent a rest
const int  R=     0;

int speakerOut = 13;

int melody[] = { b,  C,  B,  D,  a,  B,  B, g,  d,  b,  d, c, b,R } ;
int beats[]  = { 8,  8, 48,  8,  8, 64,  8, 8,  8,  8, 16, 16,16,96 } ;
int MAX_COUNT = 14; // Melody length, for looping.

// Set overall tempo
long tempo = 10000;
// Set length of pause between notes
int pause = 1000;
int rest_count = 100; //<-BLETCHEROUS HACK; See NOTES

for(int js=0; js<20; js++) {
   for (int i=0; i<MAX_COUNT; i++) {
    tone_ = melody[i];
    beat = 4*beats[i];

    duration = beat * tempo; // Set up timing

    playTone();
    // A pause between notes...
    delayMicroseconds(pause);
   }
}

void playTone() {
  long elapsed_time = 0;
  if (tone_ > 0) { // if this isn't a Rest beat, while the tone has
    //  played less long than 'duration', pulse speaker HIGH and LOW
    while (elapsed_time < duration) {

      digitalWrite(speakerOut,HIGH);
      delayMicroseconds(tone_ / 2);

      // DOWN
      digitalWrite(speakerOut, LOW);
      delayMicroseconds(tone_ / 2);

      // Keep track of how long we pulsed
      elapsed_time += (tone_);
    }
  }
  else { // Rest beat; loop times delay
    for (int j = 0; j < rest_count; j++) { // See NOTE on rest_count
      delayMicroseconds(duration); 
    }                               
  }                                 
}


[adafruit]

I second using the piezo to just play the theme, it sounds good on Tesla coils so a piezo should be fine too