July 13, 2026
Clock drama is ticking
How to build a circular LCD clock
DIY kitchen clock goes viral as commenters roast the price, fonts, and very visible cables
TLDR: A maker turned a round screen into a customizable kitchen wall clock using a tiny computer, but commenters focused on the real drama: the screen price, squished numbers on one clock face, and those impossible-to-ignore white cables. People liked the idea, yet instantly started suggesting cheaper and cleaner ways to build it.
A humble kitchen complaint — “the oven is the only thing showing the time” — turned into a delightfully extra DIY project: a wall clock made from a round screen and a tiny computer. The maker’s pitch is simple enough for anyone to get: instead of buying a boring clock, build one that can show any clock face you want, even animated ones. But the real action wasn’t on the wall — it was in the comments, where readers immediately started judging the design choices like it was a home makeover show.
The loudest reaction? Sticker shock. One commenter bluntly called the roughly $159 screen “quite expensive,” which became the thread’s unofficial mood. Another camp went after the aesthetics instead: one person said the cute cartoony clock face gets awkward at 10:29, when the numbers apparently squish together and become hard to read. Ouch. And then came the funniest mini-scandal of all: the white cables. One reader literally asked why they had to be white, then admitted, after spotting them in the photo, that they now “can’t unsee them.” That spiraled into suggestions for a cleaner wall-mounted case so the whole thing looks less like a cool gadget and more like a finished product.
Meanwhile, the nerdier rebels showed up with budget hot takes, arguing you don’t even need this setup at all if you skip the web browser and use a cheaper tiny board instead. Translation: the community loved the idea, but absolutely refused to stop backseat-building it.
Key Points
- •The project uses a 7-inch, 1080 × 1080 circular LCD with multi-touch support as the display for a wall clock.
- •A Raspberry Pi 3B+ is described as sufficient for simple animations, while a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 was found inadequate for a modern browser due to its 512 MB RAM.
- •The build uses Raspberry Pi OS, flashed via Raspberry Pi Imager, and supports remote control by enabling the built-in VNC server and connecting with a client such as TigerVNC.
- •The author chose not to mount the Raspberry Pi directly behind the screen because the included mounting method made the assembly about 4 cm thick.
- •The display is connected through the USB port labeled "Touch," which provides power and touch data, and the screen’s rear buttons can rotate touch input and cycle through five brightness modes.