I needed a clock for the shack and it seemed fitting to put something fun together. Since I’ve been busy playing with DATV on the Oscar 100 Satellite, I figured a clock that would also show the wideband spectrum activity would fit nicely. The spectrum data for the clock comes from the BATC Wideband Spectrum monitor and I’ve basically ported some of the code from Rob Swinbank (M0DTS) Quick Tune to python.
From a hardware perspective I used a Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Official 7 Inch Screen. To setup your own wideband monitor clock you only need to install the following dependencies and then clone the code from the Repo:
sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install python3-pygamesudo pip3 install websocketsgit clone https://github.com/tomvdb/wb-clock.gitcd wb-clocksudo python3 wb_clock.py
There are some variables you can tweak in the python file including your callsign. In theory this should also be able to run on a normal screen. The code is all available and fairly simple so you can tweak your clock to your preference.
Next step is to 3d print a nice enclosure for it so that it can be mounted on my shelves between my radios. Another possible addition could be to have it interface to my Winterhill Receiver (via the network) to show more details of it’s status.
Granted, this might be overkill for a clock, but since this will be in the shack I can still use it for other things such as Longmynd installation, or sdr server, etc 😉
73
1 thought on “Oscar 100 Wideband Spectrum Clock”