HomeOS – A self-hosted family dashboard for a kitchen touchscreen | Hacker News Reader

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

github.com

29 pointsdanialkhilji29 comments

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?

if TRMNL is too expensive, get a cheaper 3rd party option then:

1. flash our* OSS firmware (https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-firmware) 2. spin up an OSS server client (https://docs.trmnl.com/go/diy/byos#implementations) 3. install the Home Assistant plugin (https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-home-assistant)

no need to write any code or give TRMNL a penny, while still benefiting from a few years of deep dev in this area.

* i'm on the team

Oh nice, I didn't know the firmware and server were open source. I've seen your products on youtube videos but only seen TRMNL as a hardware product with built-in software. Knowing you can flash a cheaper display and run your own server changes things. I'll check out the firmware repo, thanks for pointing that out.

This is so true, especially to have it more seamless in the house and a better wife acceptance factor.

I had a "discussion" on this exact subject with Claude recently, trying to figure out how to do it. The final suggestion was a mix of a regular small tablet (control center), e-ink tablet (like trmnl) for a couple status dashboards, and the part that i found the most interesting: electronic shelf labels.

There is a protocol called OpenEPaperLink that has native integration for HA, and then you can buy various size of tags on sites like AliExpress.

I have not yet tested it so it's just an LLM output for now, but I do like the idea.

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

I think Home Assistant is powerful for device control. HomeOS is more focused on family coordination (tasks, shopping, notes, schedules) rather than smart home automation (although my vision is to add device controls too). But the main reason I built from scratch is the flexibility so that I can shape it exactly how my family wants it. We changed the entire theme to a warm colour palette because my family preferred it, added prayer times because we needed them, and built the UI specifically for a kitchen touchscreen. That kind of control/flexibility is hard to get when you're working within someone else's platform.

So... not an OS.

Fair point. Right now it's a household dashboard, but the long-term vision is to connect more things to it such as lights, cctv cameras, media, schedules so it starts to feel like the OS for the family. The name is aspirational for now.

No need to be pedantic, it's a system for operating a house, rather than computer hardware

From the README.md:

> Manages household tasks, shopping lists, notes, prayer times, and birthdays from a single shared display.

So what does it *operate* exactly?

> No need to be pedantic

When people misuse words, we get Cloudflare-style marketing BS. Can we be better than big corps?

I think the disagreement comes from the interpretation of "home" or "household". You might assume a HomeOS would operate all of your smart devices in your house or something like that, which would be fair. But if you think of the members of a household as being an essential part of it (which they are) then a HomeOS is also a fair description of something which operates on those members' behaviour.

Nothing pedantic about that observation.

It's not pedantic to point out obvious issues. It's not an operating system.

That is objectively not an operating system.

I got what they meant by "OS" about 10 seconds after landing on the page, but I still think it's a bad term here. The system is not controlling the operation of the home or of the people within it. It's a home-centric to do and calendaring app.

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.

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

It sounds like this just isnt what you want.

Sounds cluttered

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

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.

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

Thanks! You're right about the text size, it's currently tuned for a 9.7" iPad. On a larger wall-mounted screen the text would definitely need to scale up. The base font is already responsive (14px mobile, 18px tablet) so it should be straightforward to add another breakpoint for bigger displays. That's on my list once I get a proper touchscreen mounted.

was this built with gpt 3.5 or something?

To me it reeks of Claude. The same yellow/brown tint.

But I might be wrong:

> We changed the entire theme to a warm colour palette because my family preferred it,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535933

Good eye on the colour palette, but that was actually a deliberate design choice. I found the warm ivory theme idea on Dribbble, used ChatGPT to generate mockup images of how it would look applied to HomeOS, and then used Claude to implement it. My family picked it over a couple of other options we tried. Fair point though I can see how the warm tones might look familiar if you've seen a lot of Claude-generated UIs.

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! :)

Yes, my dad actually suggested the exact same thing! I should definitely give it a thought.

I'm also planning to use the same Linux machine to serve family photos to our PS4 in the living room — the photos would be on an external hard drive connected to it, basically turning it into a home media server alongside HomeOS. One box quietly doing everything in the background. The photo widget would fit nicely into that setup since the images would already be on the machine.

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.

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