HomeOS – A self-hosted family dashboard for a kitchen touchscreen

danialkhilji

Hey HN. I built this to solve a pretty mundane problem — my family is terrible at keeping track of household tasks and shopping lists. We tried shared apps but nobody stuck with them. Turns out the thing that actually works is a screen in the kitchen that everyone walks past. 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.

LelouBil

I want to set up something like this, but I would rather use something integrated with Home Assistant

matthaslem

Nice — mission control for the family, excellent layout and look. You could even go bigger with the text, though depends on screensize

grugdev42

Nice! 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! :)

mikhailbolton

So... not an OS.

whattheheckheck

I never liked the lack of information density in modern UI screen layouts. 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

Oras

I'm a techie, but nothing beats a magnetic whiteboard on the fridge.

ctl0v0

was this built with gpt 3.5 or something?

owldown

Cool idea, but anything that doesn’t sync offline is useless for me as a shopping list. It is good to add things to the list while in the kitchen, but the real value is having the list available while I’m inside the walk-in cooler at Costco. Reminders in iOS syncs in the background, and is up to date on my phone and my wife’s phone.

kadrian12

This is cool. Yet it reminds me of a recent insight, after hours of conversation with Home Assistant geeks: 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?

jfsebastian

I think it solves a problem for you, but I’m not sure if it’s general enough to be useful to others as well. Most of these points can also be addressed directly via Home Assistant and relevant plugins. Nevertheless, I encourage you to continue developing it so that it gains broader appeal. P.S.: I have developed custom apps for my family myself, so I can certainly relate to the original motivation behind this.