Stardate Pi

I have a Pi, but its a version 1B+. It is very slow. I have always thought it would be fun to have it displaying something, and I have a monitor in my little server closet (that yes, also did get cleaned up). I installed the latest OS on it with full desktop, and it was awful trying to wait for it to open a browser page to the cool LCARS pihole dashboard in kiosk mode. I tried using xinit to start the Matchbox window manager with the luakit browser instead, and while that is very lightweight, the dashboard page is still too much for the Pi.

So I wrote a local webpage for it to display instead, and so far this is in its capacity. I decided to have it display the current Star Trek Stardate, as calculated by Phillip.L@Sublett.org on the https://trekguide.com/Stardates.htm page. The result is a great lightweight example of HTML, CSS and JavaScript together to create a simple and dynamic web page that is easily loaded as a demo. I put it up as a Gist if you are interested.

I like Nginx quite a bit and I installed it on the Pi, and now it is serving the stardate page to my local network. I did look to see if the domain star.date was available, but its priced at $4,000, so I will not be buying that any time soon.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *