Lesson Two: Keep Updating the Current Time

The clock now shows whatever we tell it - but how do we get it to always show the current time?

The first step is to find a way to ask our computer for the current time. First we need to ask Python to give us the datetime library, so towards the top of our code we need to add:

import datetime

Now that we have the datetime library imported, we can fetch the current time using:

now = datetime.datetime.now()

Do you recognize what "now" means from our previous lesson? "now" is a variable that stores what the current time is. You can read the line "datetime.datetime.now()" as "run the method 'now()' on the datetime object inside of the datetime library." It may seem like a long way of doing it, but this stores the current time in the "now" variable so we can use it later.

If we want to pull out the minutes of our new "now" variable, we can access its "minute" and "hour" properties. For example, to get the current hour, we would type in:

now.hour

If we wanted to make our clock show the current hour and minute on our display, we would use:

display.setHours(now.hour) display.setMinutes(now.minute)

Fantastic! We can how show the current minutes and hours on our display! There's just one problem: this only sets the time on the display once when the clock starts up - it never changes!

First let's clean up our code a bit. We're going to create a function to display the current time by moving our code into a function. Replace your old "display.setHours" and "display.setMinutes" code with a new method of your creation:

def showCurrentTime(): now = datetime.datetime.now() # Set the hours display.setHours(now.hour) # Set the indicator lights display.setColon(True) # Set the minutes display.setMinutes(now.minute) showCurrentTime()

This will still only change the display once, but this cleans up our code a bit and will make it easier to set the current time over and over again. Save your work, and make sure the clock is still showing the time on its display.

To keep displaying the current time we need to listen to the "ticks" of the computer's internal clock. To do this we are going to use the "Clock" object we created earlier and tell it to call our function every time the clock "ticks." In this case one tick is almost one second - so our code is going to tell our clock to update itself about once every second.

Instead of calling the "showCurrentTime" function right away, instead tell the clock to call it using the following code that replaces the old:

# Show the current time def showCurrentTime(): now = datetime.datetime.now() # Set the hours display.setHours(now.hour) # Set the indicator lights display.setColon(True) # Set the minutes display.setMinutes(now.minute) # What to do when the internal clock ticks clock.onTick(showCurrentTime)

Save your changes and watch your clock carefully. The time should now update when the minutes change!

Next up - Use the AM/PM indicator light!