Time travel experiments in Python

12 July 2024

For the latest issue of The MagPi, I've written a tutorial about creating new clocks and calendars with Python. I've been thinking recently about how Python can be used to improve your productivity, so for this article, I provided some examples of using the datetime module to represent time in useful and inspiring ways.

The article includes a "hello world" example that tells you how many days it is to Christmas. It then shows you how to make a calendar like the one shown on the right, where a bar graph shows how much of the current day, month and year has passed. (Or remains, depending on whether you're a calendar-half-full or calendar-half-empty kind of person). If you're working on goals with a deadline of the current month or year, this can help you to see how much of your available time has already passed, and how much is left.

The second example is a countdown clock, made by wiring up a four-digit seven-segment display to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins. By setting this to the end of the work day, you can see how much time is left at any moment. This helps you to choose the biggest task next that will fit in the time available, or can inspire a mild panic to get you moving if you are on an end-of-day deadline that's closing in too fast. With magazine listings, the idea is to keep the code simple. One enhancement I thought of, but didn't include, was for the clock to have different finishing times on different days, because some days I finish at different times to others.

You can download the code for these examples here, and can find issue 143 of The MagPi online or in your newsagent.

You might also be interested in my pomodoro timer for the micro:bit, which also features in my free Coding Compendium ebook.

Issue 143 of The MagPi also includes an article I wrote about Spin, a DJ deck that plays AI-generated music. You use buttons to choose the parameters you want for generating the music and can scratch it using a real record deck.

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