Big clock on a small budget
A large clock for our fire station hall, built from a spare monitor and a Raspberry Pi instead of buying a commercial LED clock.
Juho Torkkeli
Overview & background
Our fire station needed a large clock that could be read from across the hall. We looked at commercial LED clocks, but they were too expensive. We did have a spare large display and a Raspberry Pi, so I was asked to find out whether we could build our own clock from them and save the money.
Development process
The Pi had to show the current time in a simple, readable way and boot straight into that view. I found FullPageOS, a lightweight Raspberry Pi distribution that opens a full-screen browser on startup.
I hosted the page locally on the Pi, which kept the setup simple and made it more reliable. For the page, I designed a minimal layout where the time and date take up most of the screen.
Later I refined the layout a little and added a night mode that switches on automatically based on the time of day.
Outcome
- A clear full-screen display of the current time and date.
- Starts automatically on boot, with no user interaction.
- Switches between day and night mode based on the time.
- Cost: €0, since we reused hardware we already had.
Technologies & tools
- Raspberry Pi
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- FullPageOS