In this guide we'll show you how you can create a fun little physics based hourglass gadget. Hourglasses are used to track time, and this one ends up being sort of triangle shaped, so...yah, it's a Time Triangle Thing. This project was inspired by this awesome Instagram post by @david_proyectos.

We'll go over the underlying simplified physics model also. It could be a useful approach for some other gadgets. It's all written in CircuitPython.

Hardware Items

Below we link to the specific hardware items used in this guide. However, the key ingredients are:

  • A reasonably powerful main board that can run CircuitPython and has I2C
  • LED matrix or matrices
  • Accelerometer

Therefore it's possible to come up with potentially different arrangements. For example, an accelerometer breakout could be used with a non-Feather board. Or smaller LED matrices could be used, etc. Also, the battery can be whatever size you want.

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Lithium-ion polymer (also known as 'lipo' or 'lipoly') batteries are thin, light, and powerful. The output ranges from 4.2V when completely charged to 3.7V. This...
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This guide was first published on Jun 06, 2020. It was last updated on Mar 18, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

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