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DIY family wall calendar built from a 27" commercial touchscreen, a Raspberry Pi 5, and Home Assistant. This is the public write-up. Personal hostnames, IPs, MQTT users, and family names are abstracted with placeholders like <your-ha-host>, <broker>, <user>, and <person-1>. Everything else is exactly what's running on the wall.

What this is

A wall-mounted family calendar display. It pulls from everyone's Google Calendars (plus a few iCal feeds for things like trash pickup and a cycling training plan), wakes when someone walks up, and greets the person standing in front of it by name with a short LLM-generated message.

It hangs in the kitchen and replaces the paper calendar that nobody ever updated.

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Hardware

  • Display: Planar PCT2785 27" FHD Commercial Touchscreen (VESA 100x100mm) found on Ebay for ~$200 OTD
  • Compute: Raspberry Pi 5 2GB
  • Power: 5V 5A USB-C (bundled with the Pi)
  • Cable: Duttek Micro HDMI to HDMI Coiled Cable — 1–4 ft, 4K@60Hz, slim profile
  • Cooling: GeeekPi Active Cooler for Raspberry Pi 5 — aluminum heatsink + fan
  • Storage: 64GB SD card (full Raspberry Pi OS)
  • Case: 3D printed Pi 5 case with 30mm fan mount
  • Webcam: Built into the Planar (USB, shows up at /dev/video0)

Software stack

  • OS: Raspberry Pi OS (Full Desktop, 64-bit)
  • Compositor: labwc (Wayland)
  • Kiosk app: TouchKio — fullscreen HA dashboard, MQTT integration, native touch wake