Quarantine Clock Focuses On The Essential

In these dire times of self quarantining, social distancing, and life as know it coming to a halt, time itself can become rather blurry, and even word clocks may seem unnecessarily precise — especially if you happen to have a more peculiar circadian rhythm. And let’s face it, chances are your usual schedule has become somwehat irrelevant by now, so why bother yourself with dates or an exact time anyway? If you can relate to this, then [mwfisher3] has the perfect clock for you, displaying only the day of the week and a rough estimate of how far that day has progressed.

Using a Raspberry Pi and a spare touch screen, [mwfisher3] had an easy game to begin with, so the clock itself is just Chrome running in Kiosk mode, displaying a local web site with the hours of the day mapped to an array of their textual representation. A few lines of JavaScript are then updating the web site content with the current day and “time”, and a Python script is handling the screen’s back light based on the readings from a Philips Hue motion sensor, using the phue library.

While this is definitely one of the simpler clock projects we’ve seen, this simplicity offers actually a great introduction to some easy JavaScript-based web displays on a Raspberry Pi without much fuzz and distraction. But if that’s not your thing, and you like things more mechanical, we’ve recently covered this day clock that follows the same idea, and then there’s also this light box for an artistic approach of getting a rough estimate of the time.

21 thoughts on “Quarantine Clock Focuses On The Essential

  1. Quote: local web site

    Implies getting the page over http tcpip

    However there’s no mention of setting up apache

    I’m guessing that the page is just a HTML file on the local filesystem.

    The time is coming from JavaScript , browser , OS time so nothing more than HTML JavaScript is coming from the page or potentially any http server.

    1. Having set that up, you need to build no hardware, just use an old tablet or PDA that has some method of getting networked. I had a system status monitor page displaying on a WinCE handheld in it’s dock, using IE and it’s built in wifi a few years back.

    1. Can do better than that. Can sound a loud klaxon then have a loudspeaker demand “Walmart shopper 7x5937z21p report immediately to your assigned location to collect your allotted purchases. ” *bing bong bing* “We’d like to remind our shoppers about next weeks bountiful abundance un-ration-it deal, for agreeing to consume 3 cans of wax beans, you receive 1 roll more bathroom tissue on your next allotment.”

      1. I have COPD Emphysema, a chronic inflammatory condition, a compromised immune system and many other medical conditions.

        Any flu or virus that can cause pneumoniae can kill me and it’s been that way for years.

        I have been doing all the measures of today like hand washing , social distancing and only going into public when absolutely nessesary , for years now.

        I’ve had absolutely no empathy or even understanding for how that effects my life.

        Now that you risk being in a similar position you feel you have a right to empathy.

        Not only that, you sound off at people like us for some perceived brand.

        Perhaps you best take a look into your own brand for some clues.

        It does sound like your brand is the one that people like me avoid.

        1. I imagine describing the rest of humanity as “the real virus” didn’t really help their cause. More precisely humans as a “vector for disease” would have been more accurate, and less inflammatory.

        2. I don’t know. I think I might need to call BS here ROB. If you truly were confined to your home for medical reasons then by now you would just know what internet comments are like and not take them seriously enough to be offended. :-)

      2. “Apathetic homebodies getting to rebrand their asocial nature as virtue and being sanctimonious.”

        Gee, I can’t imagine why after such a warm greeting like that.

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