# 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.

- Category: Interface (mod)
- Device: [Digital picture frame](https://afterware.xyz/d/digital-picture-frame)
- Made by: [Joel Gaff, Jr.](https://x.com/joelga) on X
- Original: https://github.com/joelgaff/home-hq
- On Afterware: https://afterware.xyz/p/home-hq-a-family-dashboard-on-a-kitchen-frame

## Can I build this?

- Difficulty: Beginner
- AI-buildability: 4/5 (Mostly a Rails app to deploy and configure, with little hands-on hardware beyond running it on a frame.)
- Time: A weekend
- Cost: $0
- Tools: computer, Docker or Kamal deploy setup

Estimates based on the original write-up. How the AI-buildability score works: https://afterware.xyz/ai-buildability

## Build sheet

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

## 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.
```

## 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

- [Project repository](https://github.com/joelgaff/home-hq)
- [Wes Bos's Home HQ prototype](https://github.com/wesbos/photo-frame-dashboard)

Tags: rails, hotwire, digital picture frame, home assistant, kiosk dashboard, sqlite

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