Summary: I am new to Arduino, am building a tidal clock (a new type of clock that tells the time based on the tides) and need advice on a couple things, if you're open to helping a girl out -- please read on!
Hi, The tidal clock I am building operates similar to a regular clock but instead of the 12hr display of a typical clock, the position of the tick marks changes dependent on the day's predicted tides -- I am on the east coast with diurnal tides. There are two parts:
(A) a 1.5" OLED SPI 7 pin display that displays 4 tick marks indicating the day's high & low tides. [figured out] The data for the tides is pulled to the Arduino from NOAA's website using an API through a wifi connection. [working on this] The position of the tick marks updates at midnight each day.
The display also features a growing & shrinking circle -- grows as the tide is coming in & shrinks as the tide is coming out. [figured out]
(B) A 3-6V motor that rotates at the pace of a 24 hr day. [working on this, am not worried about making this work]
My questions are the following:
(1) What smaller wifi-enabled microcontroller could I use to operate both the display and the motor? I'd like to make the clock housing smaller, if possible.
(2) Do you foresee any issues with having enough memory to store the display & motor code & the tide data within just a microcontroller or will I need external memory?
(3) After the experiment/brainstorming phase, what is your advice for ensuring all components are properly soldered to a solderable breadboard?
(4) how to power the motor & the arduino using the same power supply?
I need to finish the project by May 7th and would appreciate any advice that you have to offer! I'm sure I left out important information so please let me know what additional info you need to explain the project.
B) Thanks. With my basic knowledge, I only know how to make the stepper motor work incorporating a power supply module, this adds to the components that will need to be housed -- is it possible to not use the power module?
Do you have any suggestions for what would be a good board option? would something like this work?
Thanks this is really helpful, using a library to calculate the predictions instead of wifi will be very helpful. Do you think it's possible to "reverse" the calculation to show the time when high tide and low tide will occur instead of the height at a given time? I will look into this.
I plan to use a solderable protoboard -- do you have any advice for the soldering work?
Very small steppers are available that work fine on batteries. Examples include digital clocks with analog "hands" that run for years on an AA battery. In fact you can modify such a clock to run at arbitrary speeds, using an Arduino to control the motor.
The amazon product might suffice, but unlike with hobby outlets like Sparkfun, Adafruit, etc. you get no product or software support.
Yes, that is what "tide prediction" means. Given the prediction of height as a function of time, it is easy to find the maximum and minimum predicted height, then simply output the times at which those events are predicted to take place.
Adafruit, Sparkfun and others have excellent soldering tutorials, and youtube has videos.
This is an extremely ambitious project for a beginner, but a great learning experience. Completing it in 3 weeks seems unlikely.
