Overview & Background
Our fire station needed a large clock visible from across the hall. While commercial LED clock options were considered, they turned out to be too expensive. Fortunately, we had an extra large display and a Raspberry Pi available. I was tasked with investigating whether we could use these to build a custom clock and save money in the process.
Issue addressed: Providing a highly visible time display for the fire station while minimizing cost.
Development Process
To begin, I explored how a Raspberry Pi could be used to display the current time in a simple, user-friendly way and boot directly into that mode. I found a lightweight OS distribution called FullPageOS that allows the Pi to launch into a full-screen browser on startup.
I discovered that the displayed page could also be hosted locally, which simplified the setup and made the system more robust. I then designed a minimal interface that prominently shows the current time and date.
As the project progressed, I refined the layout slightly and added a night mode feature that activates automatically based on the time of day.
Outcome
- A simple and clear fullscreen display showing the current time and date.
- Automatically starts on boot with no user interaction.
- Day/night mode changes based on time.
- Cost 0€
Technologies & Tools
- Raspberry Pi
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- FullPageOS