Oh nice, I didn't know the firmware and server were open source. I've seen your products on youtube videos but only seen TRMNL as a hardware product with built-in software. Knowing you can flash a cheaper display and run your own server changes things. I'll check out the firmware repo, thanks for pointing that out.
Good eye on the colour palette, but that was actually a deliberate design choice. I found the warm ivory theme idea on Dribbble, used ChatGPT to generate mockup images of how it would look applied to HomeOS, and then used Claude to implement it. My family picked it over a couple of other options we tried. Fair point though I can see how the warm tones might look familiar if you've seen a lot of Claude-generated UIs.
I think Home Assistant is powerful for device control. HomeOS is more focused on family coordination (tasks, shopping, notes, schedules) rather than smart home automation (although my vision is to add device controls too). But the main reason I built from scratch is the flexibility so that I can shape it exactly how my family wants it. We changed the entire theme to a warm colour palette because my family preferred it, added prayer times because we needed them, and built the UI specifically for a kitchen touchscreen. That kind of control/flexibility is hard to get when you're working within someone else's platform.
Fair point. Right now it's a household dashboard, but the long-term vision is to connect more things to it such as lights, cctv cameras, media, schedules so it starts to feel like the OS for the family. The name is aspirational for now.
Yes, my dad actually suggested the exact same thing! I should definitely give it a thought.
I'm also planning to use the same Linux machine to serve family photos to our PS4 in the living room — the photos would be on an external hard drive connected to it, basically turning it into a home media server alongside HomeOS. One box quietly doing everything in the background. The photo widget would fit nicely into that setup since the images would already be on the machine.
Thanks! You're right about the text size, it's currently tuned for a 9.7" iPad. On a larger wall-mounted screen the text would definitely need to scale up. The base font is already responsive (14px mobile, 18px tablet) so it should be straightforward to add another breakpoint for bigger displays. That's on my list once I get a proper touchscreen mounted.
Hey HN. I built this to solve a pretty mundane problem — my family is terrible at keeping track of household tasks and shopping lists. We tried shared apps but nobody stuck with them. Turns out the thing that actually works is a screen in the kitchen that everyone walks past.
I had an old laptop running Linux (Garuda flavour) and an iPad nobody was using, so I put them together. The laptop sits in a drawer running Docker, the iPad connects over WiFi and shows the dashboard fullscreen.
The main features are task management with automatic weekly rotation (so no more arguing about whose turn it is), a shared shopping list with store grouping, family notes, prayer times matched to our local mosque, weather, and a calendar with birthdays.
Stack is React/TypeScript/Tailwind on the frontend, FastAPI/SQLAlchemy/SQLite on the backend, all behind nginx in Docker. One command to deploy.
The hardest part was designing for a touchscreen. Buttons need to be big enough for fingers, you need to be able to read things from across the room, and the whole thing needs to feel more like a kitchen appliance than a website. Took a lot of iteration to get right.
My family has been using it daily for about three weeks now. My dad hasn't figured out that "take out bins" follows him every week because of the auto-rotation. He just thinks he's unlucky.
135 tests, strict TypeScript, CI pipeline. MIT licensed. Happy to talk about architecture or the touchscreen UX stuff if anyone's interested.
