It’s Pizza Time!
Pizza Clock, a Raspberry Pi-powered LCD clock, displays time with AI-generated pizza slices. Cowabunga, dudes! It's always pizza o'clock!
Few things are universal in this world, but one thing that comes very close is a love of pizza. You don’t have to be a mutant turtle learning ninjutsu from a rat to enjoy a hot, cheesy slice (or three) from time to time. But if you are an overachiever — the type that cannot help but yell “Cowabunga!” at the very thought of pizza — then I have an accessory that might be right up your alley.
Pizza aficionado, meet Pizza Clock, the creation of a Hackaday.io user that goes by the handle “likeablob.” With Pizza Clock, it is always pizza time. This little tabletop clock displays the current time using slices of pizza. That is perhaps not the most accurate way to tell time (it is a notch or two below hot dogs), but it is by far the most delicious. And if you can’t tell the difference between one minute and the next in terms of pizza, there is also a traditional digital clock display superimposed on top of the pie so that you will never risk missing lunch.
The hardware consists of a circular, 4-inch 720x720 pixel LCD display driven by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. The clock face is generated by the Stable Diffusion 1.5 text-to-image generation algorithm. To get it just right (because getting an incorrect pizza order is too much to bear), a two-step process was developed. On the first pass, a very accurately sized for the current time — but not especially realistic — pizza image is generated. On the second pass, the initial image is refined to make it look mouth-wateringly photorealistic. That image is then shown on the display.
Using likeablob’s approach, it would be possible to generate any circular object in place of pizza. But how could anything else be so appealing?
To make the project even more appetizing, likeablob intends to explore more powerful text-to-image generators in the future, like Stable Diffusion XL and Flux. A case is also in the works, and I, for one, am very hopeful that it will look like a miniature pizza box. According to my watch, it’s just about pizza o’clock — anyone else want to go grab a slice?