Eclipse Timer
By Richard Rost
2 years ago
Create Real-Time Eclipse Timer in Microsoft Access
In this Microsoft Access tutorial, we will learn how to build an interactive real-time eclipse timer. I'll guide you through creating circles using reports, managing data with VBA, and crafting an engaging timer that updates as the eclipse progresses. Whether you're an Access enthusiast or gearing up for the 2024 eclipse, this project adds a fun twist to your database skills! This is part 1 of 3.
Prerequisites
Links
Recommended Courses
Eclipse Timer Series
Keywords
TechHelp Access, interactive real-time eclipse timer, eclipse tracking Access, 2024 eclipse visualization, Access VBA programming, real-time animation Access, circle drawing report Access, eclipse timing database, custom forms Access, dynamic report generation Access, location-based eclipse data
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Intro
In this video, I will show you how to build an interactive real-time eclipse timer in Microsoft Access for the 2024 eclipse. We'll set up a table to store eclipse timings for different locations, design a form to display and manipulate these times, and use VBA to let you simulate and step through each phase of the eclipse minute by minute. I'll demonstrate how to prepare your data, handle datetime fields, add buttons for changing the current time, and talk about drawing eclipse shapes using the Access report circle method, which will lead into animating the eclipse in the next part. This is a developer-level tutorial. This is part 1.
Transcript
Today, we're going to have a little fun. We're going to build an interactive real-time eclipse timer in Microsoft Access. Now, if you're like me, you're excited about the 2024 eclipse coming up just next week. It's currently March 31st, 2024. So we got about a week left, and I personally am traveling from Florida to Dallas, Texas, to watch this myself. It'll be my first total eclipse. I missed the one that came through Florida back in 2017.
And so I thought, hey, why not? Let's have some fun. Let's build a little eclipse timer. We'll do something like this. We'll put in our location. We'll put in the time that the partial eclipse begins, totality begins, the maximum totality, when it ends, and when the partial ends. We can put in the time to test it. Let's say here, let's put in a time of like 12:20, and then I'll go show graphic, and that's what it's going to look like at that moment. Then we can add a minute and watch the little moon move over the sun like that. See, that's pretty cool, huh?
And then, if you want, you can click this button or this checkbox, and then it'll track in real-time. Although, you shouldn't be playing with your access database during the eclipse. You should be outside watching the eclipse. And of course, make sure you use proper eye protection, unlike a certain former president of ours. Don't look at the eclipse directly unless it's in totality. Okay, get yourself some eclipse glasses or some welding glass. Right?
And then totality would be what? 13:40? So I'll put this at 13:39. And then we'll show it. And it'll be just, oh, look at that. Almost covered. And then we'll hit it like that. And then now we're in totality. Isn't that pretty cool? See? And we'll move across a little bit like that. Keep going. And then totality ends at 13:44. And there we go. And the sun starts to poke back out again. That's pretty cool, huh?
Now, in order to do this, we need to know how to build circles, how to create circles in Microsoft Access. Now, I haven't done a lot with drawing circles. You can't draw circles on a form, so you have to use a report, and it has to be in print preview mode. And this isn't something that I've done a lot of because I just haven't had the need for it in my 30-some years of working with Microsoft Access. But Access does have a report circle method. You can draw all kinds of circles of various locations and radii and colors and, you know, the start and end in case you want to do like pie wedges and there's a lot of stuff you can do with circles. And I'm probably not going to spend a ton of time going over circles. I know over at MS Access Gurus, Crystal has spent a lot of time building stuff like this, so I'll put a link to her page down below, and if you are more about this stuff, definitely check out her tutorials. But I'm going to give you the basics of how to draw a circle, how to make it move, how to make a sun and make it go over the sun, the prequel, right? If nothing else, we'll give you a little primer to shapes and circles and cool stuff using reports.
Before we get started, though, this is a developer-level video. What does that mean? That means if you've never done any VBA programming before, go watch this video. It'll teach you everything you need to know to get started in about 20 minutes. And there's going to be some other stuff, some if-thens, and some constants and some variable declarations, and all that. Now, there are links for all that stuff down below.
Okay, here I am in my TechHelp free template. This is a free database you can download off my website if you want to. And the first thing we're going to need is a list of times for the eclipse at your location. You can make multiple ones if you want to. Funny story, the eclipse actually goes through Buffalo, which is where I'm from, Buffalo, New York. I spent the first forty years of my life there before moving to Florida. But I know from experience that getting clear skies in Buffalo in April is pretty tough, so I decided to go to Dallas. And now, of course, the long-term forecast is showing clouds over Dallas, so we'll have to see.
But anyways, the point is, you can put multiple locations in the database. We'll set up a table for that. All right, so create, and then table design, and we'll make a LocationID; that's my auto number, a Location Name, or a description if you want. Remember, don't use just "Name." Name is a reserved word. We've got the Partial Begins, and this will be a Date/Time. Remember a Date/Time field can store either a date or a time or both together. All right.
Totality begins. We've got the maximum, which we're really not going to use, but it's just nice to know. Totality ends, and then the partial ends. All right, save this as my LocationT table. And let's put some data in it.
All right, now where do you find this data? Well, you could just do a little Google search. I found a good page here on Astronomy Magazine's site. And just scroll down a bit. Where is it at? There it is. Right? It's got Dallas, Texas, where I'll be. It's got Buffalo, New York, and a bunch of places in between. And I think if you scroll down, of course, advertising. If you scroll down a little further, there's even more information on the eclipse in here. I think I saw another chart too. Where are you at? There it is, a bigger one. Okay?
All right, so just find your spot, or spots if you want to put multiple spots in there, and we'll feed that into the table. Right now, it's Texas. Partial begins at 12:23, and I'm just putting times in here, folks. I'm not worried about seconds either. Totality begins at 1:40 PM, so I'm going to put 13:40. Maximum is at 1:42, so 13:42. I like using 24-hour time. That's just me. Totality ends at 13:44, and the partial ends at 15:02. Almost four minutes there of the beautiful totality. That's like three minutes and 40-some seconds. That's good enough. Of course, the closer you are to the center line of the eclipse, the more totality you get. If you're close to the edge, you get less. And Dallas is pretty close. We're only about halfway to the edge.
All right, I'll just do the one for now. Save changes? Sure. Now, I'm going to just turn my main menu into my eclipse form, all right? So let's just design this bad boy. I'm going to open this up a little bit. I'm going to shrink this down because we're probably not going to use it. I'm going to move this down here. We can get rid of these buttons. Let's bind this form to the record source that we just created, which is LocationT. So now this form gets its data from that. We'll change this, make it say "Eclipse Timer." And if you want to change the color, make the background black, make it look cool. There you go.
All right, so we'll bring our location over here. Okay, location. And we'll make sure we left-align that. And I'm going to slide this over just a little bit because we'll need some room here in a minute. Now this is currently set to today's date. So I'm going to come over here and we're going to go to the Alt tab, get rid of this control source that says "date," and we'll put in here the Location Name. I'm going to copy and paste that over the current date, and then get rid of that short date format. And that should be good enough for that.
Now we need our other fields. All right, so copy, paste. This will be the first field, which is "Partial Begins." We're going to come over here, make this a little bit small, we don't need that to be quite that big. Let's change this to "Partial Begins," copy, paste, and the format here is going to be "Short Time." Where are you? Short Time, just like that. Okay, or you can go "hh:nn." Remember "n" for minutes, folks, because "m" is already month. And if you do that, Access will switch it to Short Time on you. If you are being super nerdy and you want seconds, great. You can put seconds in here, but my code isn't going to take seconds into consideration, just minutes. I'm not getting super, duper nerdy with this one.
All right. Copy, paste, paste, paste, paste. Slide these up just a little bit like that. Nope, too far. Come up. There. There. Right. There. There you go. I like to select everything, right-click, go to "Size to Grid," and then right-click, and then align to grid. Make sure everybody's lined up nicely. You can see how sometimes you get little skippers in there. See how this one got too big? Another one of my pet peeves, one of my annoyances. Same, you can add that one to the list. I think it's already on the list. We're keeping a list of stuff for the Access team.
All right, "Partial Begins." What's next? "Totality Begins." I can't spell today. "Totality Begins." And this will be the "Partial Ends." Then we just got to change our sources over here and our names. So, "Totality Begins," copy, paste, "Maximum," copy, paste, "Partial Begins," "Totality Ends," and then "Partial." All right. Copy, paste.
Save it. And I also want one over here. Let's make another one of these. Copy, paste. I also want another one we'll put over here that has the current time in it. "Current Time." "Current Time." And that's so we can simulate what it's going to look like at a particular time. And we'll change this guy. We'll take the control source out of there, and we'll call it "Current Time." And I'm going to set the default value to "=Partial Begins." So when the form opens up, this will start at "Partial Begins," but we can change it. And while we're at it, let's make some buttons so we can manipulate that.
All right, make it nice and small like this. And I'll change the size here to nine. Let's call this guy "Add Minute Button." And I'll put it right there. And what's this going to do? We're going to add one minute to whatever's in there. Right-click, "Build Event." And we're right here, "Add Minute Button Click." We can get rid of this other code that we don't need. We got rid of these buttons here, so we can just get rid of that stuff. Okay, so in here, we're going to add a minute to the current time. So "CurrentTime" equals "DateAdd." We're going to add a minute. So it's "n" for minute, comma, one, comma, to the "CurrentTime" value. So add a minute to "CurrentTime." And then we'll do the same thing with a subtract button. Copy, paste, slide you here, put a little minus sign in there. That's the "Add Minute Button." We'll call this "Subtract Minute Button," or just "Sub Minute Button," whatever you want to call it. Right-click, "Build Event," and then the same thing. We've got some extra spaces in here to get rid of. We'll copy that, paste it there, and just change the 1 to a minus 1.
Save it. Always throw in a debug compile from time to time. Come over here, close that. Let's open her up. I've got a button up here on my quick launch toolbar. It just literally opens up MainMenuF. And there it is. So there's Dallas, Texas. There's our times. Here's our current time, which defaults to "Partial Begins." And then we'll hit the little button here to go plus a minute, and then minus a minute.
Okay. So we got our form all set up. We got our data all set up. Now we have to build our circles. Now like I said earlier, you can't draw circles on forms. That's a shame. It would be really cool if you could. Circle controls only exist on reports and they have to be in print preview mode. Here's my demo database that I built earlier, and you can see here's my report. It's going to look just like this.
We're going to open up a report. We're going to have a little moon and the sun. The sun will sit in the middle, the moon is going to move across it, and we'll draw these on the report based on the time. And we're going to do that in tomorrow's video. So tune in tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel. Or members, you're going to watch it right now because I'm going to record the whole thing today. So yeah, there you go, that's another benefit of being a member. But that's going to be your TechHelp video for today. I hope you learned something. Live long and prosper, my friends. I'll see you tomorrow for part 2.
TOPICS:
Creating an interactive eclipse timer in Access
Building an eclipse timer for upcoming 2024 event
Entering and displaying eclipse times (partial begins, totality begins, maximum, totality ends, partial ends)
Testing the timer with a sample time input
Animating the eclipse phases (moon covering and uncovering the sun)
Implementing real-time tracking feature
Safely observing an eclipse with proper eye protection
Drawing circles using Microsoft Access report circle method
Building eclipse shapes using Access reports
Setting up a table for different locations' eclipse times
Finding eclipse times from external sources (e.g., Astronomy Magazine)
Working with datetime fields in Access tables
Designing and creating an eclipse timing form
Using the "Add Minute" and "Subtract Minute" buttons to simulate eclipse progression
VBA programming for updating times dynamically
Understanding developer-level Access features (if then, constants, variable declarations)
Debugging and compiling VBA code in Access
Creating a report to simulate eclipse animation (continued in part 2)
Quiz
Q1. What is the purpose of the interactive real-time eclipse timer built in Microsoft Access?
A. To measure the duration of totality during the 2024 eclipse
B. To watch the 2024 eclipse through Microsoft Access
C. To track and visualize the progression of the 2024 eclipse in real-time
D. To calculate the exact coordinates of the eclipse
Q2. What is the first step in creating the eclipse timer in Microsoft Access?
A. Drawing the circles for the moon and sun on a form
B. Setting up a table with eclipse times for different locations
C. Using the report circle method to create a graphical representation
D. Programming the buttons for the real-time tracking
Q3. What datatype should be used for the 'Partial Begins' and similar fields in the table?
A. Text
B. Number
C. Date/Time
D. Boolean
Q4. What should you consider while entering eclipse timings in the LocationT table?
A. Including the exact second of each eclipse phase
B. Using a short date format for the times
C. Using either 24-hour or 12-hour time format based on preference
D. Ensuring the LocationID is manually entered
Q5. According to the video, which Access object can circles be drawn on?
A. Form
B. Table
C. Report
D. Query
Q6. How does the presenter suggest you should watch the eclipse in real life?
A. With the naked eye during totality
B. With the naked eye at all times
C. With eclipse glasses or welding glass at all times
D. With the help of the Microsoft Access timer only
Q7. What will the 'Current Time' field on the form show when the form is first opened?
A. The current system time
B. The time when totality begins
C. The time when partial eclipse begins
D. A static predefined time set by the user
Q8. What does the presenter advise to watch before attempting to create the eclipse timer if you've never done any VBA programming?
A. The video on drawing shapes with VBA
B. A video teaching VBA basics in about 20 minutes
C. A video tutorial by MS Access Gurus on circle methods
D. The next part of the eclipse timer series
Q9. When adjusting the 'Current Time' field using the buttons, what is the smallest time increment you can change?
A. One second
B. One hour
C. One minute
D. One day
Q10. Where does the presenter intend to travel to watch the 2024 eclipse?
A. Buffalo, New York
B. Dallas, Texas
C. Florida
D. In front of a computer
Answers: 1-C; 2-B; 3-C; 4-C; 5-C; 6-C; 7-C; 8-B; 9-C; 10-B;
DISCLAIMER: Quiz questions are AI generated. If you find any that are wrong, don't make sense, or aren't related to the video topic at hand, then please post a comment and let me know. Thanks.
Summary
Today's TechHelp tutorial from Access Learning Zone is all about creating an interactive, real-time eclipse timer using Microsoft Access. With the 2024 total solar eclipse just around the corner, I thought it would be enjoyable to take a break from the usual database topics and build something fun. Personally, I am traveling from Florida to Dallas, Texas for the event, as this will be my first time experiencing a total eclipse. Unfortunately, I missed the last one in Florida in 2017, so I am even more excited for this year's event.
The project we'll create allows you to enter your location and input the crucial times for the eclipse phases: when the partial eclipse starts, when totality begins, the moment of maximum totality, when totality ends, and when the partial eclipse ends. You'll have the ability to test the interface by picking a specific time and visualizing the eclipse at that exact moment. For example, you can set the timer to 12:20 and watch the transition as the moon gradually covers the sun, with the option to increment the time minute by minute to animate the different eclipse phases.
Additionally, there will be a feature for real-time tracking, so the timer automatically updates based on the current system time. Remember, though, it's best to watch the eclipse itself rather than focusing on your computer screen during the event. And of course, make sure to use appropriate eye protection. Never look at an eclipse directly unless you are in the path of totality, and only do so when it's completely safe.
Using this tool, you can watch the progress as totality approaches, see how the sun disappears, and observe as it reemerges after the event. While this demonstration covers the display element, the underlying Access tasks introduce some unique aspects—primarily, drawing circles to simulate the sun and moon.
Drawing circles in Microsoft Access is something I've rarely needed to do over my three decades of experience. Circles cannot be drawn directly on forms. Instead, you need to use a report, specifically in print preview mode, to leverage the report circle method. With this method, you can define circle locations, sizes, colors, and even create pie-like wedges if desired. While I'm just providing an overview of circle basics here, there are more advanced tutorials available elsewhere for those interested in exploring circles in greater detail.
Before we dive into the Access work, it's important to note that this is a developer-level video. If you're new to VBA programming in Access, I have a separate beginner video that walks you through the basics, such as variable declarations, using constants, and writing if-then statements. Links to these foundational lessons are available on my website for your reference.
To begin, I start with my standard TechHelp free template. This template is freely available for download on my website. The first step is to create a table to store eclipse data for various locations. You might want to have several locations saved in your database. For example, while I grew up in Buffalo, NY—which is actually in the path of this eclipse—I'm traveling to Dallas to improve my chances of clear skies in April.
Setting up the table involves creating fields for a location ID (using AutoNumber), a name or description (not just "Name," since that's a reserved word in Access), and DateTime fields for each of the eclipse event times: partial begins, totality begins, maximum, totality ends, and partial ends. DateTime fields are versatile and can store times, dates, or both, but for this project, times are most important.
To populate the table with times for your area, a quick web search will provide the necessary data. For example, Astronomy Magazine's website features comprehensive tables with timings for many locations. For Dallas, the partial eclipse begins at 12:23 PM, totality starts at 1:40 PM, the maximum occurs at 1:42 PM, totality ends at 1:44 PM, and the partial eclipse ends at 3:02 PM. You can use 24-hour time format if you prefer, as I do.
Once the table is set up and filled with your desired locations and times, the next step is designing the user interface. I modify the main menu form template and bind it to the Locations table as its record source. After updating the title and styling the background, I add controls for each key time—the partial begins, totality begins, maximum, totality ends, and partial ends—each formatted to show the time cleanly. Keep in mind that for this demonstration, the code operates with times rounded to the nearest minute, not seconds.
A useful addition is a "Current Time" field, which is an unbound field that lets you experiment and simulate the appearance of the eclipse at any chosen time. This field's default value is set to the starting time for the partial eclipse, but you can change it as needed.
To help visualize the progression, I add two buttons: one to increment the "Current Time" by a minute and another to subtract a minute. This simple interaction lets you watch the simulation as the moon moves across the sun. The underlying logic uses VBA's DateAdd function to adjust the time value in one-minute steps.
I also demonstrate how to clean up the form's layout for clarity, ensuring all controls are neatly aligned.
Once the form and supporting table are ready, it's time to shift to the graphical part of the project. Access currently does not support drawing shapes like circles directly on forms, so for the animation, I use a report to render the eclipse simulation. The sun sits at the center, and the moon moves across it based on the time you've entered. All this happens on a report that must be opened in print preview mode, making use of Access's report circle drawing method.
That covers part one of our project. In the next installment, I will show you how to build the actual animated eclipse visualization on the report, using the timing and form data you've set up here. Members get access to the full lesson immediately, but for everyone else, stay tuned for part two.
You can find a complete video tutorial with step-by-step instructions on everything discussed here on my website at the link below.
Live long and prosper, my friends.
Topic List
Creating an interactive eclipse timer in Access
Building a table for eclipse times by location
Entering partial, totality, and maximum eclipse times
Formatting and displaying datetime fields in Access
Designing a form to input and show eclipse details
Binding the form to a record source for live data
Displaying and updating the current simulated time
Creating Add Minute and Subtract Minute buttons with VBA
Programming button events to modify time in Access
Using default values to auto-fill form fields
Sourcing eclipse timing data for multiple locations
Arranging form controls for an eclipse countdown interface
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