Current Date/Time [ANSWERED]

[vinyli85]

Hey,

is it possible to have the current Date/Time displayed at the top or bottom?
Maybe you can point me where to put the code. I tried to find how to to that (goggled a bit) but did not find anything that worked. My programming skills are almost zero :)

[paddywwoof]

Yes it wouldn't be too hard to put the time on. It's basically the same code as for the name/date/location but a bit simpler, without fading and probably with a separate thread to refresh it every second. I'll post something here when I get a moment (probably not today now!)

[paddywwoof]

Hi, this is the kind of thing you could do

import threading #this should be at the top with other imports
...
text_bkg.set_shader(back_shader)
text_bkg.set_material((0, 0, 0))
################################################################################
# show time code ###############################################################
tm_text = pi3d.PointText(font, CAMERA, max_chars=10, point_size=config.SHOW_TEXT_SZ)
tm_textblock = pi3d.TextBlock(x=-DISPLAY.width * 0.5 + 50, y=DISPLAY.height * 0.4,
                          z=0.1, rot=0.0, char_count=9,
                          text_format="{}".format(" "), size=0.99,
                          spacing="F", space=0.02, colour=(1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0))
tm_text.add_text_block(tm_textblock)
tm_text_bkg = pi3d.Sprite(w=120, h=40, x=-DISPLAY.width * 0.5 + 100, y=DISPLAY.height * 0.4, z=4.0)
tm_text_bkg.set_shader(back_shader)
tm_text_bkg.set_material((0, 0, 0, 0.3))

def update_tm_text():
  while True:
    time.sleep(5.0) # only showing HH.MM so accurate to 5s OK
    tm = time.localtime()
    tm_textblock.set_text(text_format="{:02d}.{:02d}".format(tm.tm_hour, tm.tm_min)) # or put colon in CODEPOINTS
    tm_text.regen()
    if quit:
      break

tm_thread = threading.Thread(target=update_tm_text)
tm_thread.start()
################################################################################

num_run_through = 0
while DISPLAY.loop_running():
...
    if len(textblock.text_format.strip()) > 0: #only draw background if text there
      text_bkg.draw()

  text.draw()
  ##############################################################################
  tm_text_bkg.draw()
  tm_text.draw()
  ##############################################################################

  if config.KEYBOARD:
    k = kbd.read()

So you can see I basically just copied the text, textblock and text_bkg section and changed the location. x,y = (0,0) is in the middle of the screen with x increasing to right and y increasing upwards The threading function breaks when the variable quit is set to True by an MQTT message, for testing you might want to set quit true if the escape key is pressed.

    if k==27: #ESC
      quit = True
      break

[vinyli85]

Thanks, that's what I was looking for. It is working so far, only thing I have "trouble" with is to have a colon as a separator. I tried following but it doesn't work as expected:
tm_textblock.set_text(text_format="{:02d}'\u003A'{:02d}".format(tm.tm_hour, tm.tm_min))
As I understand '\u003A' should show a colon, right?

[paddywwoof]

Look at the bottom of PictureFrame2020config.py those CODEPOINTS are the characters available to use. If you want to use a colon just add it to the string! (then just "{:02d}:{:02d}" will work)

Paddy
PS in python3 you can put unicode into a string using the \u prefix so "hello\u003Aworld" results in hello:world. Because they're inside " quotes your apostrophes will just get included in the string hello':'world. Also, with PointText and TextBlock you have to specify the number of characters available when they are created; in the example code 10 and 9 so extra characters ('AM' or 'GMT' etc) might require a bigger capacity to be specified initially.

[vinyli85]

Thank again.
I played a bit with the code and I found a position and size for the time to show.

PS
Wanted to mark your comment as answer but it looks like this function is not activated

[paddywwoof]

No, I can't see where to enable that. I think Discussion is fairly beta at the moment. Also I set it to be general chit-chat mode rather than stack overflow style question and answer with votes - which was the other option. I might try switching it over to see what it looks like. In the mean time I've edited your title!
Paddy

[paddywwoof]

OK the alternative category is Q&A and that is set up in the mode for ticking answers already. I've moved these two threads from Ideas to Q&A