The Desk Mate Zero Turns a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Into a Smart Touchscreen Dashboard
Custom-designed 3D-printed housing puts a 7" touchscreen at the perfect angle to keep you informed at your desk.
Mononymous maker "Pepe" has built a compact smart display for your desk, powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer: the Desk Mate Zero.
"Desk Mate Zero [is] your desk companion that shows your favorite pictures in a slideshow, time and weather for up to 10 cities," Pepe explains of the gadget, which runs through a slideshow of pictures every 60 minutes or whenever the display is touched, provides a full-screen clock, and a location-customizable weather forecast.
Inside the custom-designed 3D-printed housing, which holds the screen at an angle for easier viewing and provides ventilation at the rear to prevent overheating, is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer connected to a 7" full-color touchscreen display. The Raspberry Pi runs the "lite" variant of Raspberry Pi OS, a Debian-derived Linux distribution, and Python scripts that pull down weather and run the display.
The touchscreen isn't just for show, either: double-tapping to unlock allows the users to add up to 10 cities to the weather forecast screens — which include current conditions, nine hourly forecasts, five daily forecasts, and the time in each selected city — and to control the system's Wi-Fi connectivity.
Source code for the project has been published on GitHub, with the 3D-print files on Printables — both under the same Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.