Introduction

This is a great battery-backed real time clock (RTC) that allows your microcontroller project to keep track of time even if it is reprogrammed, or if the power is lost. Perfect for datalogging, clock-building, time stamping, timers and alarms, etc. The DS1307 is the most popular RTC - but it requires 5V power to work.

The DS1307 is simple and inexpensive but not a high precision device. It may lose or gain up to two seconds a day. For a high-precision, temperature compensated alternative, please check out the DS3231 precision RTC. If you do not need a DS1307, or you need a 3.3V-power/logic capable RTC please check out our affordable PCF8523 RTC breakout.

Dependencies

This driver depends on the Register and Bus Device libraries. Please ensure they are also available on the CircuitPython filesystem. This is easily achieved by downloading a library and driver bundle.

Usage Notes

Of course, you must import the library to use it:

import busio
import adafruit_ds1307
import time

All the Adafruit RTC libraries take an instantiated and active I2C object (from the busio library) as an argument to their constructor. The way to create an I2C object depends on the board you are using. For boards with labeled SCL and SDA pins, you can:

from board import *

You can also use pins defined by the onboard microcontroller through the microcontroller.pin module.

Now, to initialize the I2C bus:

myI2C = busio.I2C(SCL, SDA)

Once you have created the I2C interface object, you can use it to instantiate the RTC object:

rtc = adafruit_ds1307.DS1307(myI2C)

To set the time, you need to set datetime to a time.struct_time object:

rtc.datetime = time.struct_time((2017,1,9,15,6,0,0,9,-1))

After the RTC is set, you retrieve the time by reading the datetime attribute and access the standard attributes of a struct_time such as tm_year, tm_hour and tm_min.

t = rtc.datetime
print(t)
print(t.tm_hour, t.tm_min)

API Reference

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 2

   api