One of our Approved Resellers in the Netherlands, Daniël from Raspberry Store, shared this Raspberry Pi–powered prayer reminder with us. It’s a useful application one of his customers made using a Raspberry Pi purchased from Daniël’s store.

As a Raspberry Pi Official Reseller, I love to see how customers use Raspberry Pi to create innovative products. Spying on bird nests, streaming audio to several locations, using them as a menu in a restaurant, or in a digital signage-solution… just awesome. But a few weeks ago, a customer showed me a new usage of Raspberry Pi: a prayer clock for mosques.

Made by Mawaqit, this is a narrowcasting solution with a Raspberry Pi at its heart and can be used on any browser or smartphone.

Hardware

This project is simple in hardware terms. You just need Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi 4, a TV screen, and a HDMI cable.

If you do not have an internet connection, you’ll also need an RTC clock

With the HDMI cable, Raspberry Pi can broadcast the clock — plus other useful info like the weather, or a reminder to silence your phone — on a wall in the mosque. Awesome! So simple, and yet I have not seen a solution like this before, despite Mawaqit’s application now being used in 51 countries and over 4609 mosques. And, last I checked, it has more than 185,000 active users!

How to build it

You’ll need to install the pre-configured system image and flash the mawaqit.xz system image onto your Raspberry Pi’s SD card.

There are then two options: connected and offline. If you set yourself up using the connected option, you’ll be able to remotely control the app from your smartphone or any computer and tablet, which will be synchronised across all the screens connected to Raspberry Pi. You can also send messages and announcements. The latest updates from Mawaqit will install automatically.

If you need to choose the offline option and you’re not able to use the internet at your mosque, it’s important to equip your Raspberry Pi with RTC, because Raspberry Pi can’t keep time by itself.

All the software, bits of command line code, and step-by-step guidance you’ll need are available on this web page.

Open source for all

The Mawaqit project is free of charge, and the makers actually prohibit harnessing it for any monetary gain. The makers even created an API for you to create your own extentions — how great is that? So, if you want your own prayer clock for in a mosque, school, or just at home, take a look at Mawaqit.net.