Family calendar display

A while back I built one using an old monitor and a raspberry pi that booted to DAKboard. It worked pretty well before Dakboard decided to eliminate the number of calendars you could view for free and become a "paid" service. It was effective, in expensive and pretty easy to set up.

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I've looked into doing this as well. Although, I'd much prefer not to get tied into a recurring fee.

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Our solution was to make a single google calendar for family events.

I'm going to do something similar at my house and my MIL's house. Dakboard looks nice, but like others I'm trying to avoid yet another subscription. Looked into PiSignage, info-beamer, etc, still haven't found anything that will do quite what I want.

It would be nice if it were interactive, so really I guess nothing can beat a website or app built for the purpose, displayed on a tablet or pi+touchscreen.

For me, I'd like a calendar view that shows today in detail, the upcoming week in slightly less detail, and the typical month view all at once. I also need some screen space for things that don't necessarily fit on a calendar, like misc todo's and reminders. Maybe a virtual whiteboard to highlight certain things.

I'm trying to design something usable by your average adult, but also something that kids and maybe senior adults who aren't quite "with it" anymore can use.

I might integrate a PIR sensor so that the screen only comes on when you're near, and maybe add some LEDs to flash colors or patterns when something needs attention.


I have no idea how long this will take me, but if anyone is interested I'll be sure to report what I come up with.

Skylight calendar is what you are looking for

Home Assistant will do the majority of that with moderate effort and knowledge. A lot of it is even kind of automatic, it will detect a ton of smart things around your home and add monitors and controls for them. It will find your printers and report ink levels, it will find and control your smart lights, smart thermostats, stream sticks, cameras, etc. Weather is on there by default, hooking up rss feeds is dead simple, shopping list, etc. Just search "home assistant bleh" and almost anything will pop up.

Adding a "now playing" card will depend on what you're playing media with. If you use Plex then it's easy, you just install the plex integration and put the card on your dashboard. It gives you controls, status history, and it adds background art for whatever is playing. You can use the state to set off automations, like dimming the lights while playing and turning them up when paused/stopped. You can do the same based on the streaming device state, as well, regardless of which app is running. I'm just not sure which integrations give you cover art like the plex one does.


I might end up using HA for my project, assuming I can figure out how to develop my own calendar integration that presents everything how I want.



Example HA Plex card:

Why not just a cheap Android tablet and leave the Google calendar open and stick it on the counter.

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Home Assistant

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I've been able to do some cool stuff with HA. My problem with the calendar is that so far I can only display the current month, week, or day. So right now, my calendar tab/view shows all of June. I don't need to see the past 21 days. I really want to see the next 14-21 days and that's it.

The best part about Dakboard is that it allows me to select how many weeks I want to show. I've been playing with a demo screen on their site. I set it to display 3 weeks and I feel that's perfect. The two big downsides to Dakboard is the closed, subscription-based system AND I don't think I could do it as a touch screen. I can live without the touchscreen, but the monthly fee is something I'd like to avoid. $150 for their rasberry pi device plus a display plus $5/month for what I'd like to do. I feel like I could do something better for less. Maybe I'm too damn picky.

I have a couple "MagicMirror"'s running on older Pi3's that provide the family calendar and other important things. One in each office, it does pretty good if you remember to actually look at it.

Clicked on here thinking Korkstand had an update on his creation and am now wondering what kind of rabbit hole did you run into for your first post to be a bump of an 18 month old thread.

We use the old trust magnetic white board, but as the kids start getting more into afterschool activities will need to go digit

We have the new echo show and we love it for this. Shows our events for the day. Linked to our google calendar. Has our shopping list and to do list as well.

Echo show