A kitchen photo frame now runs the whole household

Home HQ turns a wall-mounted digital picture frame into a live family dashboard: calendars, chores, weather, Home Assistant controls. It's a Rails 8 app, open source, built on Wes Bos's prototype.

Build sheet

Device page: Digital picture frame →
Device: Digital picture frame
Stack: Rails 8, Hotwire, SQLite
Deploy: Kamal
Integration: Home Assistant

Can I build this?Beginner · AI 4/5 · $0

Difficulty: Beginner
AI-buildability: 4/5
Time: A weekend
Cost: $0

Tools

computerDocker or Kamal deploy setup

Starter prompt

Based on "A kitchen photo frame now runs the whole household" on Afterware: https://afterware.xyz/p/home-hq-a-family-dashboard-on-a-kitchen-frame

Help me set up a Rails 8 app with Hotwire and SQLite that shows a family dashboard on a wall-mounted display. It should have a rail with tabs for today, chores, calendar and weather, with each section refreshing on its own using Turbo Frames. Seed a demo household relative to today's date so the layout can be tested before real data is added.

Estimates based on the original write-up. How AI-buildability is scored. Building with an AI assistant? Connect it to Afterware (free MCP server).

Story

The whole dashboard is one page with a rail and a set of views, and each piece refreshes on its own: when an event starts, on the hour, or when a write changes it. Writes answer with Turbo Streams, so every screen in the house updates live. Joel Gaff, Jr. built it on Rails 8, Hotwire and SQLite, and deploys it with Kamal.

The look and behavior come from Wes Bos's Home HQ prototype. Underneath sit people, routines, chores, and stores with aisle orders. Calendars come in from ICS feeds, weather from Open-Meteo, and drive times and devices through Home Assistant. Each screen gets its own night mode and idle view. The frame signs in once through an enrollment link; phones sign in with an email code.

Worth stealing: a seed task builds a demo household relative to today's date, so the dashboard looks current before you enter any real data. Below 700 px wide, the rail collapses into a five-tab bar for phones.

Resources · 2

Project repository Wes Bos's Home HQ prototype