I had an old laptop running Linux (Garuda flavour) and an iPad nobody was using, so I put them together. The laptop sits in a drawer running Docker, the iPad connects over WiFi and shows the dashboard fullscreen.

The main features are task management with automatic weekly rotation (so no more arguing about whose turn it is), a shared shopping list with store grouping, family notes, prayer times matched to our local mosque, weather, and a calendar with birthdays.

Stack is React/TypeScript/Tailwind on the frontend, FastAPI/SQLAlchemy/SQLite on the backend, all behind nginx in Docker. One command to deploy.

The hardest part was designing for a touchscreen. Buttons need to be big enough for fingers, you need to be able to read things from across the room, and the whole thing needs to feel more like a kitchen appliance than a website. Took a lot of iteration to get right.

My family has been using it daily for about three weeks now. My dad hasn't figured out that "take out bins" follows him every week because of the auto-rotation. He just thinks he's unlucky.

135 tests, strict TypeScript, CI pipeline. MIT licensed. Happy to talk about architecture or the touchscreen UX stuff if anyone's interested.

Cool idea for you:

Have one of the widgets as a photo album.

Upload some images, or maybe connect to a Google Drive folder.

Then every day it shows a family photo! :)

I want to see the mission/vision statement, the entire year calendar, quarterly/monthly goals, backlog of tasks, daily schedule all in one view with the ability to edit any of it in minimal time from intent to do so.

So therefore it stays physical. No app does this

Software is not their issue. Display hardware is (but they'd never admit that).

They've usually got all their data in their Home Assistant, tracked by often > 400 individual devices & sensors, visualized in several dashboards. But rarely does anyone actually put that data into their physical spaces, because there's no obvious choice for small-sized screens, long-lasting batteries, cheap, customizable. Something like Trmnl comes close, but is too expensive for most.

So their data stays in the Home Assistant app, mostly accessible through their & their partner's phones and maybe tablets.

If someone manages to build & sell cheap, easily customizable e-ink displays in various sizes, that would enable so much more creativity with custom dashboarding. Imagine every small concern gets their own screen AND their own physical place.

Am I missing some obvious, great solutions to this?

P.S.: I have developed custom apps for my family myself, so I can certainly relate to the original motivation behind this.