As sure as the sun rises, you can count on technophiles to be extremely picky about their gadgets and software. Consider the case of a Redditor going by the handle “ctl,” for instance. After looking for a home dashboard and finding nothing that was a perfect match for the requirements, ctl decided to hack a custom solution together.
The goal was pretty simple, really — display a calendar and the weather, manage a task list, and play videos and music for entertainment. You might be thinking that this sounds like the perfect use case for a tablet, and you are exactly right. However, the home dashboard is meant to be mounted on a wall and viewed from a distance, so even mega-sized tablets just won’t cut it.
With nothing shopping cart-ready in sight, ctl pieced a home dashboard together from a 24-inch touchscreen monitor in portrait mode, and a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer. By installing LineageOS on the Raspberry Pi, it was able to run Android, just like a lot of tablets do. Nova Launcher was then installed to help manage the user interface of the device. Everything was placed in a custom wooden case before being hung on the wall.
The result looks great, and it is infinitely customizable, so it should be able to meet the needs of even the pickiest of users. But ctl is not done just yet — as new use cases arise, the device is likely to get some upgrades, so check back in later for updates.A Raspberry Pi-powered home dashboard (📷: ctl)
The possibilities are endless (📷: ctl)
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