About

About the Internet Cuckoo Clock

The Internet Cuckoo Clock is a clock powered by a Raspberry Pi 3 computer running Raspbian OS combined with a mounting in a real Black Forest cuckoo clock case.

The case has had the original movement removed and the clock has been replaced with a quartz movement and the bellows removed as well with a speaker replacing the bellows to produce the characteristic cuckoo clock sound.

A custom program was written to sample time from the Internet via NTP as well as to provide access to output pins on the Raspberry PI GPIO pins to actuate servos to control the movement of the cuckoo bird.

The program also sends tweets via a Twitter command line program to send the correct time to the Twitter iCuckoo user as well as to randomly send quotes and humorous sayings to the Internet. Holidays and special observances and timely news items are also shared via the custom program to provide more than just the time.

As of this early moment in time with the project, only the program is running while we fine tune the initial logic and integrate the final Raspberry PI computer and robotics to the case. The actual clock case and mechanism will be fully integrated in June 2017. For now, our initial clock is running on a dedicated Raspbian system. More later as we produce videos and articles to cover our build of the project.