💻 ambitv

AmbiTV is an ambient personal dashboard we made for a small TV in our living room.

Like it's inspiration - the Chromecast "screensaver" - our screen includes a photo gallery and the time, but it comes with some extra perks:

• the current temperature and weather, and upcoming 24 hour high and low
• my calendar
• the sunset times (the dark part)
• a rain forecast (embedded in the left edge of the calendar)
  • (in the screenshot, 7pm has a tiny little rain blip)
• file pinning (not shown)
  • allowing Canna to upload a file (usually a recipe) to have on the screen
  • (abused by a friend of mine occasionally to "vandalize" our screen with silly images - feature or bug?)

It runs off a Raspberry Pi Zero that points to a web page. It sometimes crashes (the Pi Zero wasn't meant to run a full browser; it struggles with the full screen images).

Future

• set it up to run off a portable screen I have (our TV that was running this died)
• figure out a fix for the crashes (upgrade from the Pi Zero? have the server just generate images, and skip the browser?)
• include time-to-sunburn on the calendar
• layout the images so our faces aren't covered half the time