Idea

Confined to a single room while working from home has many pros and cons. One of the biggest problems I have though, is not knowing what time or day of the week it is. The One-Glance Lamp gives me a rough estimation, but when staring blankly at YouTube all day, I need to know when it's time to beg for food or go to sleep.

   

Build

My wife had an old Dell laptop that was no longer up to the task, so while ripping apart the hard drive for security reasons, I kept the screen for later use.

Now all it takes for any decent screen to get up and running is signal and power. For LCD screens, it's trivial to pick up an LCD driver from eBay or Amazon. This particular screen that Dell used was so unique that I had to wait four months for delivery from AliExpress. Thankfully it arrived and worked like a champ - with some free CoronaVirus included.

Tacking a spare Raspberry Pi 3 with MagicMirror software on to the back, the screen was once again useful as an information dashboard - or as the drum circle hippies up here call "upcycling."

Quickly building, sanding, and staining a frame to fit, I nailed it to the wall for all to see. The most fun is deciding what "modules" you'd like to use and where on the screen they'd fit best. I trimmed my choices down significantly to give it a more minimal appearance.

Right now it's displaying current time and date, PiHole stats, Plex stats, and has a rotating "Nintendo" background image from Unsplash.

All things considered, this was a very easy beginner project, but really cool nontheless.