2 Retro Clocks with an ESP32 (Couldn't be simpler!)

in this video we'll take a look at building these two retro gaming clocks and the best part about it is it couldn't be any simpler there's nothing you need to code and from starting the project to having it working can be as little as five minutes the first thing we'll need is one of these matrix displays normally these displays are used in a much larger screen but we're just going to use one individual panel of it this one here is a 64 by 32 but they're also available in other sizes i really like these displays because they come out of the box ready to use in your project basically i've previously built a matrix out of neopixels and it took hours of soldering and you need to build a physical frame for it so i'm probably never going to make one again and the final part of the puzzle is an esp32 which is an arduino compatible board with built-in wi-fi and bluetooth they're my favorite microcontroller they come in a lot of different shapes and sizes but the one i'm going to use today is my open source esp32 trinity which is specifically designed to plug into the back of these displays if you don't have a trinity don't worry you don't need to get one you can just use a regular esp32 and just connect the appropriate wires as shown on screen so next let's take a look how quick and easy this is to wire up the first thing you do is open the trinity and throw away the instructions you then loosen the screw terminals of the trinity you'll see why in a second next we'll line up the arrows of the matrix panel with the arrow on the trinity and plug it in you then want to take the power cable that came with the display and plug either of the connectors into the display and then connect these spade terminals into the screw terminals we loosened earlier make sure black goes to ground and red goes to 5 volts and that's it completely done and wired ready to go next we need to look after the software so normally you would download the code and flash it through the arduino ide but we're going to flash it directly from the web browser using esp web tools this is something i covered in a previous video if you want more information i have a list of projects that are ready to flash directly from the browser on the trinity's github page at the moment it's just these two but i'll be adding more as time goes on we're going to click the link for the wi-fi tetris clock project and when we're on that page we're going to click install we then need to select the com port of our esp32 and click ok it will now flash the project directly to your esp32 it'll take a little bit just over a minute but that's pretty good the next thing that we need to sort out is how we're going to power the display so the trinity has the ability of being powered either by this barrel jack or via the usbc you must use 5 volts with the barrel jack or bad things will happen ask me how i know i'm going to use usbc to power the project and in order to do that i need to move this jumper to diode bypass there's full instructions on the trinity github page for what this means or why you need to do it so check that out the final step of this process is to configure the project this is a clock that gets its time from the internet and it doesn't know your wi-fi details to get around this we're using a library called wi-fi manager which i covered in a previous video but basically wi-fi manager hosts an access point on the esp32 that you can connect to with your phone and then configure details about the project from there when you hit save in wi-fi manager the clock will restart and you will be finished that's the project completely set up from scratch to ready in about five minutes and what's cool about this setup is because it's using a standard wiring setup that you can just change to a different project if you don't like that one anymore so let's take a look at installing the mario clock the first thing i'm going to do is take the trinity and plug it out of the 64 by 32 matrix and into the 64 by 64 one i'm then going to visit the web flash page of the mario clock and hit the p button and follow the on-screen instructions and once that's finished you just need to configure it using wi-fi manager like before and that's it done a completely new project in about two minutes you

Channel: Brian Lough

Views: 104,150

Keywords: arduino, esp8266, electronics, maker

Id: vugulzS0EoU

Length: 5min 36sec (336 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 10 2022