This project is a Halloween talking clock that plays sounds every hour. Only a few external components (easy to source and solder) are needed.
The Raspberry Pi Pico draws about 1.6 mA in it’s lowest power mode (deep sleep). Seems not much, but it is too high for a battery powered circuit, because they will exhaust in around two months. For that reason, an external power circuit that can shut off the board completely was added. After that, power consumption was lowered to 70 uA, so batteries will last for a year.
The Pico acts as sound storage and player. To show the time and generate an hourly signal, a quartz clock movement with trigger was used. Combining these 2 elements, a talking sound clock was born.
For software, two versions of the same application were made: one developed in CircuitPython and the other in the C/C++ SDK. There’s no need to recompile code (in the app developed in CircuitPython) to change sounds
Read more on Galopago projects and on Hackaday.
