Moon-Pi displays today’s moon phase and a random moon-related quotation on an e-paper display. A Raspberry Pi Zero W hidden in the frame runs the show.
Maker Billy Dent had been wanting to make his wife a Raspberry Pi-powered gift for a while now, so when Mother’s Day rolled around, he thought of combining her love of the moon with a slice of Pi.
Hardware
- Raspberry Pi Zero W
- 5.65-inch Waveshare e-paper display
- PiJuice Zero (a little onboard power supply and power management system for the Pi)
- A deep box frame (the kind you frame medals and tangible memories in)
You can use any Pi you like. It doesn’t need to be powerful and it doesn’t need to be Wi-Fi ready, as all the data is stored on the SD card — Billy just likes working with the Zero W.
Remember to drill ventilation holes in the backboard of whichever frame you use, or your hardware will get sweaty. You can make a hole for the USB recharging cable at the same time.
How does it work?
The PiJuice powers up the Raspberry Pi Zero W daily at 1.30am and it only needs to run briefly to update the display for the day ahead. All the lunar cycle data and quotations are stored on the SD card, avoiding the need for an internet connection. A Python script runs automatically at boot and looks up the date. Then it finds out today’s moon phase and grabs the image file titled with today’s date. Next, a moon-related quotation is selected at random, and this text, along with the image of the moon in its current phase, is thrown up onto the e-paper display. Once it has done its job for the day, it shuts itself down, leaving everything on screen for Billy’s wife to find when she gets to her desk. How efficient.
Billy has shared all the code and a step-by-step build guide on Github.
First-timer
This build is Billy’s first ever project post in the raspberry_pi subreddit. This is a) a laudable milestone, and b) a good time to mention that that subreddit isn’t ours — it’s fan-run, without any involvement from Raspberry Pi. We do love finding super projects like this one over there – it can be a real trove of cool ideas and builds.
