A simple dashboard that shows two calendar views (by day and agenda), a traffic map, the weather, and a picture of your choosing. This was a reaction to my previous efforts with Magic Mirror, which is a fantastic app, but is completely overbuilt for probably 95% of the implementations. Also MagicMirror runs a bit slow on the pi zero.
Simple Pi Calendar on the other hand is just an HTML page that you load up in a chromium browser on your pi. This was quick project, but it works. I did pull out all the config values though, so it's not a total mess.
The runs well on any computer from the most underpowered (pi zero) to your laptop. It's built to be loaded without a webserver, just open the page in a browser (once you've set up the config of course). If you are using it on a pi it's worthwhile to set it up to launch the browser at startup and preload the page.
The calendars make use of a library called FullCalendar. In order to get it to properly reload the calendar on a recurring basis, the whole page reloads every 30 minutes.
This expects to be run on a widescreen monitor turned on its side. The dimensions are hardcoded into the html right now. But you can go in there and modify them to suit your needs.
You will need to make your own config file config/config.js, there is an example file to help
cp config/config.js.example config/config.js
vi config/config.js
# edit away
If you want something other than the cheezy default image, place a file in the directory with the name image.png. If you need it to be another type, you'll have to update the source
In order to setup that file you will have to create API keys for Google Calendar and Google Maps. This is pretty easy, but does require a google account. Here are some simple straightforward instructions on getting an API key. Follow the same steps to get a Maps key as well - you'll want a key for the Google Maps Javascript API.
Install unclutter to make the mouse disappear when not in use, this might require a reboot to take effect
sudo apt-get install unclutter
Modify your autostart
vi ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart
Here is my version, it also stops screen blanking and the pointer from showing up:
@lxpanel --profile LXDE-pi
@pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE-pi
@point-rpi
@xset s off
@xset -dpms
@xset s noblank
@unclutter -idle 0
@chromium-browser --incognito --kiosk http://127.0.0.1
Now you just need to setup a basic webserver to serve the index.html file in he root of this repo try this if you need help with that: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/web-server/apache.md
Pro tip: If you are sshed into the pi and still want to be able to launch chromium to test, you can use this:
DISPLAY=:0 /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser --disable-quic --enable-fast-unload --enable-tcp-fast-open --disable-gpu-compositing --enable-pinch --incognito --kiosk http://127.0.0.1
- Emoji Support: Figure out how to get the pi to display cute emoji's when you put them in your calendar entries. I did find this article, but that didn't resolve things for me. If I do sort it out, it would likely need to be a script that you run on the pi, since it's an OS or browser level change
- Dynamic resolution support: to get things to look nice I hardcoded the dimensions. Math could likely be used to get this looking good without hardcoding, but that was beyond the scope of my kitchen display.
- More efficient Calendar Reload: take another stab at getting calendars to refresh without reloading the whole page, which is a bit jarring on a pi zero