Project: Home hub

My wife and I have been working over the last little while on better communicating and streamlining our lives. We had/have a dry erase board on the wall that we write out the monthly calendar on every month and add things like what bills are due on what day or if we have something going on. The problem is when we are not at home and add something to our respective Google calendars we forget to add it at home. We could share our calendars with each other but for example I have 6 or 7 different calendars. I decided I was going to use my Raspberry Pi and an old screen to make a new wall calendar that uses our joint email account and syncs our shared stuff to the joint account and displays it.

Problem: embedding a calendar which many tutorials do it completely and totally horrendous and ugly.

From what I can tell though Googles Calendar API v3 returns JSON so in theory I could build my own calendar UI with monthly and daily views. I also thought about using the Forecast.io API to have weather data for the wee displayed. I doubt we would break the 1000 query limit in a month on the free account. Maybe some sort of push notification style system.

Most tutorials using the rPi to build something like this use a web server and a webpage in fullscreen mode. That allows for nearly universal device compatibility, but I’m not against building a native application. I’m still in the planning phase but figured this might be a fun project to do. If anyone has an idea for a feature or a design input I am totally open to making this project a joint venture.

Currently the hardware specs are a Raspberry Pi 2 and either a 15” 1337x768 LCD with a driver board or a 13” 1024x768 LCD monitor. I’d love to find something in the 20” 1920x1080 touch screen.