A somewhat theoretical question, since I haven't actually started on this project yet...

Is it possible to get the current date and time in a PD patch running on a raspberry pi? I know there are some externals that do that, but I'm not sure how I'd approach it.

Thanks!

You can use [shell] from the ggee library and send it the message "date". Though the Pi should probably be connected to the internet to give you the correct date and time.

There’s also clock hats for the Pi, they let you keep time without an internet connection

@amazingrolo you can just use the [time] object from the "zexy" library. also works on the pi.

@Johnny-Mauser ah cool. do I need to do anything special to use that object on the pi? how do I install it?

sudo apt-get install pd-zexy

@Johnny-Mauser @alexandros Thanks for the help, I got it working.

For future people who might struggle with this (and as a help to my future self when I inevitably google this problem again), to get the zexy library working after installing it you need to define the library when you launch PD. For example:

sudo pd -lib zexy -nogui mypatch.pd

(I'm using sudo because the patch accesses the GPIO pins, and -nogui because I'm running on the command line)