Instructables member ‘ppeters0502’ has built an awesome recreation of the Weasley location clock from the Harry Potter books and films, which is powered by a Raspberry Pi mini PC.
Using an old clock together with a couple of Sail Winch Servos, and Adafruit PWM/Servo Pi-Hat, Acetyl 48 pitch hub mount gears and a handful of other components the location clock is capable of providing up-to-the-minute details on where family members are located.
Ever since I was 8 years old, I’ve loved Harry Potter, and the world that JK Rowling built with her books. I always felt like I related to Harry’s friend in the book, Ron Weasley, and I especially loved that Rowling tied the wizarding world into the real world. I wanted to try and bring a piece of that world in to my own (while also geeking out with raspberry pi’s and GPS!), which led me to starting this project of recreating a prop in the book.
This project is an Internet of Things Location Clock (or Whereabouts Clock or Weasley Clock). Rather than having 2 hands that give you the time of day, this clock has a hand for each member of your family or group, and displays the hand over wherever that person is. My clock, for example, has 2 hands (one for me and one for my wife) and shows locations for Home, School, my Parent’s house, our favorite bar, the opera house (my wife and I volunteer for the opera), etc.
This Location clock works through a raspberry pi, that subscribes to an MQTT broker that our phone’s publish events to. Our phone (running the OwnTracks GPS app) sends a message to the broker anytime we cross into or out of one of our waypoints that we have set up in OwnTracks, which then triggers the raspberry pi to run a servo that moves the clock hand to show our location.
Jump over to the Instructables website for details and instructions on how to create your very own. If you enjoy building Pi projects you might be interested in our comprehensive list of Raspberry Pi displays, HATS and small screens.
Source: Instructables : RPiF
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