Heads Up Dashboard Display Planning Notes - 09/25

September 9, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

  • Documentation: Sep 9th, 2025

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What I'm Working On

A simple dashboard to display on a 7 inch monitor which I purchased to monitor our newborn:

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The objective: display essential information on a screen that's used exclusively for this puropse with a KDE Window Rule. Something like this:

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Why It's On Github

Collaboration and explaning the idea.

Doesn't This Exist?

I would happily pay $x/month (within reason - my SaaS budget hurts!). Or self host something. But - among a sea of dashboard projects - I'm having a hard time finding a good fit.

General observations:

  • There are great digital display projects (Xibo, Yodeck, Anthias). But these are targeting a more complicated and different use-case: businesses don't typically want to embed personal Google Calendars or inboxes, for example! Financially these also tend to charger per screen: if you're a tech fiend with lots of devices you'd like to display on, what is a trivial expense for a startup quickly becomes a non-runner. Hence for what I'm trying to achieve, these often end up feeling "overpowered but also underpowered."
  • Another promising category is server homepages (think: Heimdall etc). The problem here is that these tend to be pitched to home labbers and often have a strong anti-Google bend with widgets that support everything but common SaaS / non-self-hosted productivity tools. These are great for what they do but are not quite the tool for what I'm looking for.
  • Rasperry Pi projects: I own a Rasperry Pi and several Orange Pis and thought about recommisioning one for Dakboard (etc) but the idea doesn't make much sense to me: if you create a great dashboard, why bind it to a physical piece of hardware? Web UIs can be protected via Cloudflare, etc, and a web UI is just about the most hardware-agnostic way to create a frontend. This seems like the much more logical approach to me.

My problem - maybe that of many - is that what I want straddles a few traditional software divisions: I want elements of NVR (to watch video feeds), Google Calendar integrated embed objects, and off-the-shelf widgets.

So ... I'm DYI-ing.

My Personal Dashboard

I recently became a father to a wonderful little man. I'm also something of a night owl (understatement of the century).

There are currently two things I want in my heads up display:

  • At night time, a way to glance at my IP cam to make sure that our dear one is okay.
  • During the day, an embed of my Google Calendar so that I can check my schedule and see when my next meeting is.

Very useful: next meeting in X. Where X is the time in hours and minutes.

I'd also love: previews of my inboxes or feeds (I use two Google Workspaces, one for personal and the other for business; hence everything comes in twos).

Other Dashboard Elements

Other useful things for me:

News Feeds For Situational Awareness:

  • I live in Israel. Red Alert is our national rocket alert system. There are a few third-party implementations, but the official one is protected by geofencing. This makes it challenging to add in off the shelf dashboard builders which create embed objects from non-Israeli IPs. This is another reason why I want to create something locally deployed.

  • Google News. My philosophy about news consumption especially in a conflict zone: less is more. Ideally the top items on the national agenda (proxy: Google News top stories, Isreal English), a trusted RSS feed (Times of Israel), and a location-specific one for Jerusalem.

  • The weather: today, tomorrow; condition, temperature (celsius) and chance of precipitation (if not raining). Other climatic things which are helpful to know: PM2.5 at a local station (color coded), whether it's warmer than 35C (ie, VERY hot even by local standards!), and whether it's below 2C and plants might need to be taken in.

Time Display

I love UTC not because I spent time in the military (I didn't) but because I'm both a recovering aviation geek and frequently work with people in different time zones. UTC creates a single deterministic global time.

I'm also an ADHDer with a weird brain: I hate clocks with seconds displays as I find them distracting. But hours and minutes are A-okay.

I also like to see the date displayed in another weird format, like: Mon, 09th Sep (09) 2025. I like dd/mm/yyyy and this format is one I've stuck with to provide all the key details. If space is at a premium I hope that I retain enough sanity to remember the year and go, instead, with Mon, 09th Sep (09). I can never remember - including now - how these are notated in MementoJS.

Wireframes (Raw Sketches: Me; Enhanced Wireframes: Gemini Nano Banana)

Tab 1: Home

Homescreen with clocks, main cam overlay (PIP), weather.

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Tab 2: NVR / Cam Grid

Embedded NVR with grid and cam views.

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Tab 3: News / RSS Grid

News and RSS grid with red alert pane.

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Tab 4: Comms Quadrant (Email And Cal)

Essential comms quadrant with calendar and email views for personal and business inboxes.

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