[BrandoElFollito]

My own family dashboard. I did not purchase it but wrote myself and it was a life changer.

It is an always-on screen (during the day) where everything family oriented happens: all our calendars merged for today and tomorrow (and important events within 6 days), weather, when kids are back from school, info when I am on my way back from work, various alerts on stuff breaking at home, etc.

When I finally installed it, my wife told me to get rid of this monstrosity. After a few days I just switched it off one evening and the morning after it was chaos at home. Switched back and fast forward to 7 years and there we are.

Probably the most useful thing I built in my life.

[BrandoElFollito]

OK, taken the unexpected comments :) I will do a longer write-up here and point to this block to join the comments together.

The aim of this dashboard is to be always-on with the following information displayed (a link to an image of the dashboard, there is not much available at this moment: https://imgur.com/a/pHSIBcO)

- current time and date

- current temperature as seen by Netatmo in my neighborhood

- estimations for rain in the next 60 minutes - from Météo France

- weather forecast for today and tomorrow

- all family calendar merged for today and tomorrow + specific events within 6 days

- alerts when there is a water leak, or when something is broken, or when flowers need water

- when are kids coming from school today and tomorrow

- information when I am driving or biking from the office with estimated arrival time

This is powered by a keyboard- and mouse-less old Raspberry Pi and displayed on an old screen mounted on a wall (one day it will be neatly mounted IN the wall. One day.). It is displayed with

I am not a developer but wanted to do the software part anyway myself. There were several changes over the last 7 or 8 years. Initially I wrote a backend that would query the information from the various sources but I ended up with a purely client-based SPA that connects to Home Assistant, which in turn retrieves all the information and keps state.

The frontend was the opportunity to learn JS/TS/Vue and I rewrote it three times to learn Quasar and recently to move to a pure Vue3/Vite/TailwindCSS frontend. It was a fun trip. It helped me enormously to also learn how to interact with APIs in less-ideal conditions.

I also tried to directly use the dashboarding capabilities provided by Home Assistant but I did not really like everything. I may revise this one day if I get a touch screen (a touch monitor) because then it makes sense to use the widgets HA has natively.

Coming up next: the ability to have several screens switched by a button

[theshrike79]

We're going to need some details :)

I tried doing this with an Android tablet, but the screen is just way too small. Now there are really nicely sized (15.6") USB-C -powered displays for around $100 that could be paired with pretty much any Raspberry Pi to do the same.

Or I could just shove an old 24-27" inch display on the wall with a VESA mount...

[BrandoElFollito]

Thanks for your comment! I summarized the various points in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37764585

[endisneigh]

Seems like a fun project but couldn’t you do the same thing easily with a shared combined calendar and a tablet of your choice displaying said calendar?

[theshrike79]

No, because then you're just limited into showing a single calendar.

Some stuff you want in agenda-format (next 5 events on the calendar), others you want in a monthly view, others in daily or weekly.

And then you have alerts, weather etc that doesn't really fit the calendar format that well.

[endisneigh]

interesting. in that case I'd use widgets on an ipad which support all of those use cases.

[codingdave]

You are over-engineering this concept. A simple shared calendar absolutely would work. If you want more features, go for it, but that doesn't mean a shared calendar is a non-functional solution.

[BrandoElFollito]

I really wanted more information on that dashboard (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37764585)

[theshrike79]

Look at the sibling comment and the example image of the dashboard they built: https://imgur.com/a/pHSIBcO

How can you do this with a "simple shared calendar"?

[morjom]

Care to detail it a bit more? How much did you use frameworks if at all etc (you did say you wrote it yourself so probably no framework, or?)

[BrandoElFollito]

Thanks for your comment! I summarized the various points in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37764585

[dugmartin]

I’m planning on using MagicMirror (https://magicmirror.builders/) to do this in my kitchen but without the mirror part (just a TV mounted in a niche on the wall). Did you build your software from scratch?

[BrandoElFollito]

I considered this too but finally realized I may want to have the information in several places, not all behind a mirror. But th eidea i neat.

I summarized the points in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37764585