Published 22 minutes ago

Dhruv Bhutani has been writing about consumer technology since 2008, offering deep insights into the personal technology landscape through features and opinion pieces. He writes for XDA-Developers, where he focuses on topics like productivity, networking, self-hosting, and more. Over the years, his work has also appeared in leading publications such as Android Police, Android Authority, CNET, PCMag, and more. Outside of his professional work, Dhruv is an avid fan of horror media spanning films and literature, enjoys fitness activities, collects vinyl records, and plays the guitar.

Like most chronically online people, I keep coming across cool projects and products. That’s exactly how I came across Skylight Calendar. It’s a digital picture frame that doubles up as a family calendar. Sounds pretty nifty. What isn’t nifty is the $300 price point of the model with a 15-inch display. But it did seem to solve a problem we faced as a family. Like most families, we’ve been juggling multiple calendars across phones, tablets, and laptops. Everyone has their own schedule, and then we have shared calendars for shared activities. Having access to a shared dashboard for our calendars would solve a big problem with not just glancing at our events, but also with making time for shared activities, especially if the dashboard was always visible and up to date — like the Skylight calendar. But I wasn’t very comfortable paying that much for a closed ecosystem and subscription. Thing is, I already run Home Assistant and have a wall-mounted tablet that serves up Home Assistant. How hard could it be to try to build my own version?

Saving money wasn’t the only appeal here. The fact that I could fine-tune the experience to suit my home and my specific needs appealed to me. Here’s how it went.

Home Assistant as the calendar backbone

Google Calendar integration and a wall-mounted display make it all possible

At the core of the project is Home Assistant acting as the nerve center to pull in the calendars and handle the displays. I run Home Assistant on an always-on NAS and use an Android tablet as the display or control center for all the smart home devices in my home. It already manages all the lights, motion sensors, and automations around the home. So, adding a calendar display into that mix made perfect sense to me. Plus, down the line, if I want to, I’d also have the foundation to make calendar-based automations.

The first challenge to solve the issue was calendars. Since we’re a Google Calendar household, it shouldn’t, on paper, be a big challenge. However, we all use our own separate calendars in addition to shared calendars for holidays and reminders. Home Assistant tackles this part with ease thanks to the Google Calendar integration. Not just that, it goes a step further by treating each calendar in an account as an individual entity. Once everything was set up and synced, I could see each calendar independently and control how, when, and where it appeared on the dashboard.

This segregation was important so that I wouldn’t dump every single event onto the screen. While I’ve got my personal calendar displayed on the home office dashboard that’s tuned to my personal needs, I can also use time-based filtering or even set up views and helpers to control when specific calendars or entries will be visible on the screen. This level of control goes beyond anything offered by Skylight.

Since I already have a wall-mounted dashboard, I just started adding these to my existing display with interface elements scaled to work consistently on the 12-inch display. So far, so good. With a bit of hit and trial with fonts, color for contrast, and large-enough touch targets, I was already in a good place.

Two sync and rock-solid performance

With the basics in place, I went about creating a new dashboard that would be better suited for shared family viewing. However, I didn’t want everyone’s calendars to crowd up the space. So, I set up triggers based on individual accounts to switch the view source to individual calendars. Tapping an individual’s profile immediately pulls up an individual calendar.

Since I wanted this to be something that everyone in the house could use, I also set up an oversized add event button that automatically lets you add an entry to the shared Google calendar that’s already set up. This works seamlessly because Home Assistant is already tapped into Google Calendar, and any changes here immediately sync back to the cloud and show up on everyone’s devices, no matter if they are at home or outside. That two-way sync was a non-negotiable for this setup to work.

That’s it. While I admit my setup isn’t quite as aesthetic as Skylight’s commercial product, that’s a problem that can be easily solved. For now, I wanted to build a proof of concept to see how much use it would get out of everyone. I’ve also started experimenting with automations. For example, if I have a calendar entry for an early morning call, Home Assistant can pick up on that and start the heating in my home office a few minutes before that so that the room is nice and cozy by the time I walk in. These are small touches that build on Home Assistant’s strengths and help bring the calendar to life.

Performance is another factor to consider. I can’t reasonably expect Skylight to ship a powerful chipset for such a niche product. And such products tend to be less than stellar in day-to-day use. In my case, though, all the processing happens on my home server, and the tablet only serves as a viewport to control things. This means that performance will never really be an issue as long as I maintain my server.

And finally, building this yourself gives you a lot of flexibility. I’ve already got date and weather widgets included in the dashboard, but that’s just the start. I’m already thinking of interesting additions to make that would elevate the experience for everyone.

Living with my DIY Skylight clone

The real test of any project is whether it will work past the demo phase. However, so far the result has been promising. It’s given me ultra-quick visibility into my schedule and my family’s schedule. I could be grabbing a quick coffee in the morning, and I just need to glance at the dashboard without having to pull out my smartphone.

Compared to the commercial Skylight product, my DIY Skylight clone isn’t as pretty. But that’s something I can always iterate on thanks to the power of Home Assistant. It’s the functionality that matters, and if you’re running Home Assistant, this is a project you should absolutely experiment with if you’re struggling to get your family calendars under control, like me.

Home Assistant

Home Assistant is the easiest way to pull together all your smart home devices into one single spot and build cross platform automations.