The ESP32 Analog (Analogue!) Clock

As promised, here's the new stupid analogue clock. 

It consists of two 270 degree analogue meters, thoughtfully calibrated 0-70V and 0-300A, kindly donated by Andy from North Hill Audio in Malvern, and an ESP32 with it's nice in-built RTC, wifi etc etc...

The idea is almost identical to the previously stupid analogue clock, found here. This time, we will use the ESP32's built in wifi to connect to the internet, and pick up the time from an NTP server, and set the ESP32's inbuilt RTC. There's an example in the ESP32's arduino library to do this, and utilises the standard time.h library to maintain the clock. I'll set a random time to refresh the RTC randomly between 12 and 24 hours, I don't want to keep bothering the NTP server. I can then output hours and minutes using PWM to drive the meter movements. 

First off we're going to need to do something about the scaling on our meter movements, as I can't easily drive 0-70 volts, nor 0-300 amps! 

Examining the meters shows the 0-300A meter is actually a 75mV full scale deflection meter (FSD), designed to be used with an external shunt of 0.025 ohms (or does it ... read on), this is good, as we can easily drive that.

The 0-70 volt meter reads directly. Disassembling it shows it has a "multiplier" resistor (actually 3 resistors in series, one adjustable) with the earthy end of the movement. 

Shorting out the multiplier gives us a meter with about 200mV FSD, perfect. The meters are dated 1972.

Both meters pull a fair amount of current ... 

A schematic is conjured up. There's not much too it.

As ESP32 has no native support for analogWrite, but we can use the ledc function. I don't care it's not driving an LED, and neither should you 😉. Each output pin, feeds the base of BC547 NPN transistor which is driving the meter. There's a 1K pot in the emitter to allow FSD for the meters to be set accurately. The venerable 7805 regulator supplies our +5V to the ESP32 and meters. 

There's an output on IO18 for a PM indicator LED, and an output on IO15, which I'm going to use to drive a relay, to give the clock a ticking sound ...

The script has some differences to the original ATMEGA328P script, as there's no 409Hz interrupt timing required, as the RTC is doing that job for us, and the code to receive the 433MHz timing signal has now gone, as that's now taken over by NTP. There's a section to extract the individual hours, minutes and seconds from the RTC, and load them into separate variables that we can manipulate. There's also no "smooth" function, as both hours and minutes are smooth, and there's no 400Hz interrupt timer to give us 1/409th of a second to drive a "smooth" seconds meter, and there isn't one anyway! The clock is also permanently set to 12 hour mode, with a PM indicator on pin XX. I've retained the fabulous "IsBST" routine. It just works. If you're outside of the UK, you'll need to modify the code to suit your timezone.

The software can be found on my github page at https://github.com/andydoswell/ESP_32_analogue_clock

The electronics is mounted up on perf board.

So that's the electronics and software sorted. 

I ordered a wooden craft box from eBay to mount it all in.

A couple of stains and finishing oil are tried out on the inside... 

.. and while they dry, I use libre cad to make a cutting plan for the front. 

The template is printed out , and taped to the box.

The two holes are cut out for the meters

The box given many coats of finishing oil to bring out the grain, and give it some shine.

I had to get a bit creative when  mounting the meters, as I didn't have the original mounting hardware..

I added some redundant 19" rack handles as a stand. I'm pleased with the results.

There, and goodnight, it's 250 amps past 51 volts!

I notice there's a kickstarter, where you can now buy something very similar. 

Pyers read this last night, and has pointed out the value of the shunt is wrong. I simply glanced at the back of the 300A meter, and mis-read it... I had wrongly assumed 0.025ohms was the value of the shunt... But 75mV across 0.025 ohms only gives us 3A... not 300.

Reading the label correctly, it simply states "Use with external shunt" , and the 0.025ohms is "lead resistance". The shunt should be 0.00025 ohms for a full scale deflection of 300A.