DAKboard showed me how valuable a dedicated wall display could be for keeping our family synchronized. But for our household, I wanted complete private local control, offline media resilience, and no monthly software subscriptions.
“I did not set out to copy DAKboard. I set out to build the version our home needed.” Running on a compact Raspberry Pi 5, MoeBoard gives us a private 24-inch smart calendar tailored exactly to our family routines.
These additions were crafted specifically for our home's daily workflow. DAKboard is a separate commercial service and served as the initial inspiration for this personal project.
No monthly software fee, password-protected settings, and private local control. Family media, calendar connections, and configuration stay on the Raspberry Pi inside our home network.
Connects multiple read-only Google calendars with individual names and colors, plus selections from multiple Google Photos accounts. Calendar caching handles brief outages; saved palettes and portrait or landscape layouts make the display ours.
Local uploads and saved Google selections keep compatible photos and videos available offline. Videos play to completion with HDMI sound and volume controls, while every media item appears once before the collection reshuffles.
Birthdays, anniversaries, and U.S. holidays receive smart highlights. Happening Now can show three simultaneous events, while the wide This Week agenda and compact month stay readable across the room. Automatic startup, service recovery, and portrait restoration keep MoeBoard dependable.
Observing where off-the-shelf wall displays created friction or required recurring costs in our daily routine.
Using Microsoft Visual Studio as a digital workshop to construct custom interfaces and resilient background logic.
Using MoeBoard every day on our home display to catch edge cases and improve readability from normal viewing distances.
Implementing background automated checks for calendar behavior, security protocols, local uploads, video playback, and display reliability.
Whether shaping PLA on our 3D printers or building custom software in Visual Studio, Michelle and I love making practical ideas real. Keep an eye out for our next software experiment, VoltCue.