Building Smart Azan Clocks with Lenovo ThinkSmart View and Pi Zero 2

When I bought those Lenovo ThinkSmart View for Teams devices, I wasn't sure what I'd do with them, but I knew one thing for sure: I'd be modding them for HA or some other Assistant.

At home, we have an alarm clock that plays the Muslim Azan five times daily. These times change often. These specialized Azan alarm clocks use AA or AAA batteries. You set them up by pressing buttons, entering your location, and so on—but every time the battery dies, you have to start over.

I got tired of this and, like anything that bothers me, I thought,

"This shouldn't be this hard."

I tried some not-so-user-friendly solutions, like running a command on Google Home through a custom app that makes API calls back and forth. Meh. Like I said, it shouldn't be that hard.

So, I finally found a good use for the Lenovo ThinkSmart View. These devices run a customized version of Android that's locked to the Teams app. After some research on HA forums and xda-developers.com, I rooted the device and loaded vanilla Android on it. Then, I set up my favorite kiosk app, Fully Kiosk Browser, and pointed it to http://smartazanclock.com/. Using the touch screen, I found it picked up my location automatically, and I set up Azan by different moazzins. All good to go!

This idea works perfectly, just in time for Ramadan, which started on March 1st.

Now, a new prototype is in the works using a Pi Zero 2 in a 3D-printed enclosure.

It will run FullPageOS without GPU acceleration to save memory on the low-memory Pi Zero. Maybe next week I'll have it ready.