ledmatrix-pi-clock

Code for an LED matrix clock and weather/air quality display running on a raspberry pi

Installation and Setup

Hardware

You need a rasbperry pi 4 or greater, an Adafruit RGB Matrix HAT (or similar), RGB matrix, and sensors (I'm using sht31d, sgp30, and veml7700 from Adafruit).

Follow Adafruit's tutorial to setup the pi with the hat here

Main clock script

See this part of the Adafruit tutorial in particular about setting up the software

Once that's all working, you can install this repo by cloning it and installing the requirements.txt. The rgbmatrix module unfortunatley requires running as root, so it's easiest to not use a virtual environment.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Config file

Then copy the config file and edit it:

cp example.config.json config.json

You're going to need an OpenWeatherAPI key (a free key works fine), and put it in the config file. Also update the lat and lon with your current lat/lon to get local weather data.

Running Clock

Unfortunatley the rgbmatrix module needs root access to work

Run the clock from the root of the project:

sudo python3 src/run_clock.py

I like to run this as a service so it persists between reboots. I put the service files at this path: /etc/systemd/system/....

You can see my examples here

and run it with:

systemd restart ledclock

If it works, you can set it to run at boot with:

systemd enable ledclock

Webserver

The webserver is optional, but nice for controlling the clock. I reccomend using a virtual environment for this one since it doesn't need to be root. Once you make that, install the dependencies in webserver/requirements.txt.

To run flask either use root with app.py (easy but insecure) or install a middleware like gunicorn.

I reccomend setting up a service in the same way as with the main clock script, and you can see my examples here.