Quote Clock on a Pi Pico
posted
tagged:
python
Project notes for building a quote clock using micropython on a Pi Pico W.
Testing a footnotegoog.
Time
The Pi Pico has no battery and loses its time. Once its on the internet, sync the local clock:
import ntptime
ntptime.settime()
# prints UTC time
print(f"Time: {time.localtime()}")Todo: Convert to local time
Raspberry Pi Pico W
MicroPico (aka Pico-W-Go) - VS Code extension for Pi Pico boards - this looks excellent, but is quite buggy, I had a lot of issues with it, so stopped using it and instead am using [Thonny](https://thonny.org/ to connect to the pico.
Disk space
The pico has 2MB of flash memory, but after flashing the Pimoroni rom, only ~800kb of space is free. This caused an issue as I have 1.1MB of quotes in a json file to write. I used gzip to compress this to ~0.5mb, which should fit.