How to Build a Digital Time Clock Using Python

Welcome to the Python Projects for Beginners Series 🙋🏻‍♂️

I'm Sai Ashish and today, I'm going to show you how to build a live digital clock using Python with just 12 lines of code😍

How exciting is that? Let's get started 🚀

What Are We Going to Build?

This amazing digital clock ⏰

What Are We Going to Learn Today?

1. Tkinter & Time Module
2. Basics of Python: Functions
3. Creating a Tkinter Window, Giving Title to the Window, 
   Setting Background & Setting Label
4. Implementation of the Digital Clock With Detailed Explanation

You can access the exclusive theory used in this project here. Don't forget to smash the star button if it provided value to you 💯

Step 1: The Design

Hold on! Hold on! Before diving into the development part, an insightful coder must have a clear idea of the project he is going to make. To keep it as simple and elegant as possible, I planned a rectangular digital clock with a black background, white text, and the HH:MM:SS time format. You can choose to add AM/PM as per your liking.

Step 2: Modules Required:

1. What is the Tkinter module?

For this project, we would be using the Tkinter module. Tkinter is a Python binding to the Tk GUI toolkit. It is the standard Python interface to the Tk GUI toolkit and is Python's de-facto standard GUI. You can access the official documentation of Tkinter Module from here.

2. What is the Time Module?

The time module provides various time-related functions. We use it to retrieve the system time and display it on the screen. You can access the official documentation form here📄

Step 3: Time to Code!

The first step is to import everything(all classes, functions, and variables) stored inside Tkinter to our program file. To do that we type:

from tkinter import *

'*' stands for all/everything.

After importing Tkinter, I'd like to import a function called strftime from the module time. The strftime() method returns a string representing date and time using date, time, or datetime object. In simpler terms, it retrieves the system time.

from time import strftime

Now, I want to create a window for the clock. To do that, I make use of Tk from the Tkinter module.

root = Tk()  # Creates tkinter window

Let's give the title to the window as 'Digital Computer Clock.'

root.title("Digital Computer Clock")  # Adds title to tkinter window

Creating a function to display time on a label. For this, I will be using the Tkinter Label Widget.

# user defined time function
def time(): 

# fetching the system time in the desired time format and storing inside variable string
    string = strftime("%H:%M:%S %p") #%p for AM/PM
# label variable displaying time retrieved from the computer
    lbl.config(text = string)
# run the function after every 1000ms, that is 1 second
    lbl.after(1000, time)

Styling the label widget with font Arial, size 160, bold format, background color as black, and foreground color as white.

lbl = Label(root, font = ("arial", 160, "bold"),bg="black",fg="white")

The pack method in Tkinter packs widgets into rows or columns. I want the content to be packed in the center, filling the entire space assigned to it both horizontally and vertically. Lastly, the expand option adds a little space to the widget box if necessary.

lbl.pack(anchor = "center",fill = "both",expand=1)

Finally, we call the functions and run the program.

time()
mainloop()

The Final Source Code for the Digital Time Clock Can Be Seen Below :

We did it 🥳 We have made our own digital clock with just 12 lines of code!! How amazing is that? As a gift for staying till now, you get access to my Python For Beginners Series Repository 😍 This repository contains all the source code you'd need to get started as a Python Developer 🐍.

You can also download the source code to this project here. Do hit the twinkle star, if this article provided value to you 🔥

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Bonus Insights by The Insightful Coder :

• Interested in Building Your Own Artificial Intelligence Projects using Python?: Check out the Python AI Series🧠

• Wanna Discover Some Valuable Tech-Hacks 🛠?: Check out the Tech-Hacks for Everybody Series😎

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