It can be hard to stay on top of things. You have your own busy schedule, and you may also need to track the schedules of the rest of your family on top of that. Factor in something you can’t control, like the weather or traffic, and things can sometimes get chaotic. Hopefully for the better, we now have electronic aids like Google Calendar and online forecasts to help us out. To keep everyone in his family on the same page, Tom Scott came up with his own wall-mounted informational display.
As you might suspect, this isn’t an entirely new idea. Tom based his build on a similar model found in this Instructables article. That, in turn, was inspired by this electronic wall calendar, so if you want to build your own there should be plenty of inspiration available.
Scott’s build started out with an HP monitor that he wasn’t using, which was interfaced with a Raspberry Pi 2 model B with an assortment of adapters. These components were framed with wood and hung up on one of his walls. Scott, who’s worked in IT for over 17 years, found this to be the hardest part of the project, though the resulting panel looks quite nice.
The whole project took Scott somewhere between 10 and 20 hours, working on and off for a few weeks. Naturally, some of this was spent trying out different setups and waiting for parts. He’s been fairly pleased with his build, and both he and his wife can now share their Google Calendars in harmony without an additional hard copy on the refrigerator.
In addition to the calendar and weather, the bus timer is another excellent feature. Their kids’ bus driver generally arrives at the same time every day, so having a countdown automatically pop up 21 minutes before it gets there certainly adds the proper urgency to the situation! If that wasn’t enough, he programmed in a recording of himself saying “FIVE MINUTES!!” at the appropriate time.
[via Reddit]
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