I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

Posted by saeedesmaili 14 hours ago

I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard(hawksley.org)

993 points | 241 commentspage 7

ekjhgkejhgk 11 hours ago||

Aesthetically, that e-ink screen looks gorgeous. But the idea of having to maintain a bunch of services and hardware so that I can see my calendar, I hate it.

hawksley 5 hours ago|

As I mentioned at the end of the post, I'm working towards having this work as a Home Assistant App, which would make it a lot easier to set up yourself.

dakolli 6 hours ago||

I love having my Calendar staring at me everywhere I look...

tibbydudeza 12 hours ago||

Interesting but it assumes the teens will bother to look at it.

We use a WhatsApp channel for our family to manage breakfast meetups and who needs what from the shops or the pharmacy (they are on our healthcare plan) and general conversation about events or troubles and parental advice in their lives.

One kid live on her own with her bf a few minutes from us but she can't drive so we sometimes have to pick her up from work.

It gets muddled but works for us as the rule is no pet photos unless it is very cute (cat with a dustbin cover on his head) or inspirational daily quotes.

with 7 hours ago||

Awesome

IshKebab 13 hours ago||

This is cool. I bought an Inkplate for this and got as far as writing a custom image format suitable for e-ink sort of things (4-bit RLE; trivial to decode, but good compression for diagram/text type images).

Where I got stuck is calendars... Unfortunately Google Calendar doesn't seem to provide a nice API where you can just say "give me the events for these days", instead you can only download all of your events in iCal format. It's then extremely non-trivial to convert that information into "what is happening today".

xd1936 12 hours ago|

There are several ways to get all events for the day! The easiest one in my experience has been to write a simple Apps Script project and expose that as a published Web App[1]. That moves all of the oAuth logic and Calendar API plumbing to Google's server-side code, and gives you a simple long URL that contains exactly what data you want.

Something like:

```

function doGet(req) {

  let start = new Date();

  start.setHours(12,0,0,0);

  let end = new Date(start);

  end.setDate(end.getDate() + 3);

  let events = CalendarApp.getEvents(start, end);

  return ContentService.createTextOutput(events.map(x => x.getTitle()));

}

```

1. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/web

IshKebab 11 hours ago||

Ooo sweet, thanks for the hint!

rsl1 13 hours ago||

Very nice, looks great

idontwantthis 9 hours ago||

This is a cool project and I know hacking is good in and of itself, but I wanted to share that my family and I use a whiteboard on the fridge and a paper calendar to great effect. It brings us closer to each other while keeping us from missing appointments and events, and allows us to leave messages for each other to be viewed in slow time.

sublinear 10 hours ago|

> There are still several data sources I fetch directly outside of Home Assistant. Once HA is the sole source of data, I’ll be able to have Timeframe be a Home Assistant App, making it significantly easier to distribute.

Yes, please distribute this as an HA app. I can't wait to see that.

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