He lists out the materials and code he used. He went with a low cost / low power ESP32 microcontroller. This is fine if you mostly want to do lower resolution, static stuff. Here you could design something that'd run off batteries for quite a while.
If you're into fancy animations, maybe some videos, then you'd need to go with something a bit more beefy, closer to a Raspberry PI running some sort of *nix, potentially with some browser to render beautiful pages :)
Obviously there's significant price difference between the two approaches, but there's also some pros and cons you'd need to consider.
Our talented engineers are given significant ownership and responsibility over projects. We value rapid iteration, continuous integration and testing, and we are serious about producing high-quality, maintainable software. Frequent code reviews, linting, and pairing are all integral components of our engineering culture. We encourage experimenting with new technologies and constantly challenge ourselves to improve our code, processes, and systems.
I also had a similar story. It was also early 2000s and our high school had a calendar system for each student so they could look up in which room they would have what class.
So a friend of mine and I have setup a proxy server which would modify rooms randomly, or randomly cancel classes. In order to "test out" our code, we ARP+DNS spoofed the the whole school network, so anyone visiting the site internally would end up on our site.
Most students thought it was super fun that their classes were "cancelled" but obviously teachers didn't approve :-)
It was also a couple of months away from our graduation, and we did get into pretty big trouble, where we got suspended, and had to write a letter of apology to the principal so they would allow us to graduate.
https://github.com/Madelena/esphome-weatherman-dashboard
He lists out the materials and code he used. He went with a low cost / low power ESP32 microcontroller. This is fine if you mostly want to do lower resolution, static stuff. Here you could design something that'd run off batteries for quite a while.
If you're into fancy animations, maybe some videos, then you'd need to go with something a bit more beefy, closer to a Raspberry PI running some sort of *nix, potentially with some browser to render beautiful pages :)
Obviously there's significant price difference between the two approaches, but there's also some pros and cons you'd need to consider.