How to Build a Custom Circular LCD Clock with Raspberry Pi
How to build a circular LCD clock
I built a wall clock using a Waveshare circular LCD and a Raspberry Pi because our kitchen only had an oven displaying the time. This guide covers the hardware setup, installing Raspberry Pi OS, and configuring touch gestures for navigation. I also share how to control screen brightness automatically and showcase several custom clock faces I coded, ranging from Swiss railway styles to minimalist designs.
In our kitchen, the only device that displays the time is our oven!
- blinry
Author here! :) This article is me sharing something that made me really happy, wanting to show others how they can do the same.
I see some comments pointing out that the clock wouldn't need to run in the browser. I picked this option to make it simple for folks around me to quickly prototype their own clock faces. This isn't supposed to be the cheapest or most efficient implementation, either; feel free to build your own LCD clock and then blog about how you did it!
- trencedamp
Beat project, but
> I also tried with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2, but 512 MB of RAM were too little to run a modern browser,
You don't need a browser to display graphics. And you don't need to be a programming whiz either. I'm sure Claude could write some python to render these clock faces.
- fxwin
> The Pi 3B+ seems just enough to render some simple animations.
> I think a Pi 4 might be a good sweet spot between processing power and price,
I know this isn't exactly a serious product and more of a gadget/gimmick but man we are off by a factor of like 3-4 here :D
- atulvi
Maybe you'll love my minimalist clock design https://euclid.tulv.in/
- zerobees
How to build a circular LCD clock, step 1: buy a circular LCD that looks like a clock.
I'm not kidding, that's the extent of the build. They simply connect that display to a computer over HDMI. The only hacking here is browser-based JS for clock animations.