BakBoard

A couple months ago I had the idea that it would be nice to have a display in the kitchen to help the family be organized and coordinated.  I wanted it to have a clock, school schedule information, calendar information, and a family Fitbit leaderboard and to power it with my Raspberry Pi.

While searching around I came across DakBoard which seemed close to what I wanted.  It provides date/time information and displays calendar events.  Additionally it can display weather information, but the really brilliant piece it has that I was missing from my idea was to display pictures.  I immediately created an account to try it out, but unfortunately ran into some problems with the Dropbox integration and was unable to get support in the forum and my e-mails for help went unanswered–it seems not much is happening with DakBoard.  Since the code isn’t open source and it didn’t provide for my requirements, I went about creating my own “BakBoard”.

The above picture is a screen shot I took of BakBoard this evening.  It currently has the following features:

• Date/time in the top left.
• School information in the top right.  If it is before 4:00pm, it displays the schedule for the current day and after 4:00pm it displays the schedule for the next day.  The service that provides the school schedule information is described in this post.
• Calendar information on the bottom.  It provides five days of information: the current day and the next five days.
• Fitbit leaderboard on the right.  Currently it just has the avatar and number of steps.
• Picture is the background for the entire board.  The pictures come from from selected subdirectories in my DropBox folder.  The picture changes every 10 seconds.

It remains a work in progress and I’m learning a lot, but already the family enjoys having the BakBoard display in the kitchen.  In future posts I may describe how things are implemented, what I’ve learned in the process, and new features added.

Author: Nathan

I like to do stuff. View all posts by Nathan