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Daft Punk Word Clock

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Feb 032022
 

I recently published notes and project files for my Daft Punk Word Clock on hackaday.io. This is a project I did over New Years to make a word clock-style interface to the song “Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger” by the ubiquitous musical robots from France.  I’d had an idea to do something with this song for a while, but when I sat down to go through the lyrics, I realized there were only 18 unique words, so making a classic word clock, but showing the current line instead of the current time seemed like a neat idea.

Before building any sort of custom hardware, I wanted to prototype it, so I used a spare Adafruit PyBadge, since it runs CircuitPython and has a reasonable display and speaker output. The project came together pretty quickly. I spent some time in Audacity tagging all the lyrics to get time stamps, then processed that into a Python data structure, then built code to show the word clock, with highlights starting and stopping at the required times. This was similar to work I’d done in my day job with display and timing of closed captions. I also used level data from the MP3 decoder to drive the light strip as a cheap audio visualizer.

The biggest issue was audio sync. The clock on the PyBadge wasn’t quite exact, so using the real-time clock to time changes to the clock resulted in getting very out of sync by the middle of the song. This was especially hurt by performance issues with redrawing the screen. I had to increase the MP3 decoding buffering to help with CPU blocking during redraws, and I had to made a code change to the MP3 decoder in CircuitPython to add an attribute showing the current playback time, since that would actually match with the position in the song, where the unsynced system clock would not.

I could see a future version of this using a 3D printed clock face and LED matrix to make this more real, but I’m pretty happy with it as is.

Jan 182022
 

People leave useful things out on the curb all the time. Toaster ovens. Kid’s shoes. Sofas. Old TVs. Not-so-old TVs. And, often, printers. Inkjet printers, in particular, are a rich source of important nutrients such as motors, gears, sensors, wifi, and power supplies. It’s always fun to pop them open and salvage the good stuff.

A motor driving a shaft with a quadrature encoding wheel attached.

These are parts from an Epson WF-2540 I found in the trash that I spent a morning disassembling with my kids. Look at this beautiful quadrature encoder wheel. And that lovely little stepper and worm gear! There’s even a peristaltic pump in this one. It’s a bonanza. Every time I disassemble a printer, I end up with three piles: one of useful parts, one of plastic and metal scrap for recycling, and one of components that are too specific to make use of. Oh, and one of these frickin’ things:

control panel of an Epson printer, with many buttons and a color LCD screen

Oh. You again.

My old nemesis, the control panel. A couple dozen buttons, a few LEDs, and a color LCD, all in a well-designed, sturdy package. I can think of a half-dozen uses in a heartbeat. Wouldn’t it be nice to use this as an interface for a media player? A robot arm? A pen plotter? Your air conditioner? A midi sequencer? An overly complex toaster?

The problem is that every control panel is its own reverse engineering project. Usually I just give up on these as being too complex to reuse as a single unit, but for some reason I thought this time, I’d give it a whirl. After all, that flat cable coming out the back only has fourteen pins. How hard can it be?

I approached this project in two stages. The first was to be able to read all the keypresses and blink the LEDs, which I was pretty confident I could handle. The second, being able to display images on the embedded LCD, was, well, trickier. But let’s see how far we can get!

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 Posted by at 8:37 pm