I think Home Assistant is powerful for device control. HomeOS is more focused on family coordination (tasks, shopping, notes, schedules) rather than smart home automation (although my vision is to add device controls too). But the main reason I built from scratch is the flexibility so that I can shape it exactly how my family wants it. We changed the entire theme to a warm colour palette because my family preferred it, added prayer times because we needed them, and built the UI specifically for a kitchen touchscreen. That kind of control/flexibility is hard to get when you're working within someone else's platform.
Yes, my dad actually suggested the exact same thing! I should definitely give it a thought.
I'm also planning to use the same Linux machine to serve family photos to our PS4 in the living room — the photos would be on an external hard drive connected to it, basically turning it into a home media server alongside HomeOS. One box quietly doing everything in the background. The photo widget would fit nicely into that setup since the images would already be on the machine.
Fair point. Right now it's a household dashboard, but the long-term vision is to connect more things to it such as lights, cctv cameras, media, schedules so it starts to feel like the OS for the family. The name is aspirational for now.
I think the disagreement comes from the interpretation of "home" or "household". You might assume a HomeOS would operate all of your smart devices in your house or something like that, which would be fair. But if you think of the members of a household as being an essential part of it (which they are) then a HomeOS is also a fair description of something which operates on those members' behaviour.
I got what they meant by "OS" about 10 seconds after landing on the page, but I still think it's a bad term here. The system is not controlling the operation of the home or of the people within it. It's a home-centric to do and calendaring app.
I never liked the lack of information density in modern UI screen layouts.
I want to see the mission/vision statement, the entire year calendar, quarterly/monthly goals, backlog of tasks, daily schedule all in one view with the ability to edit any of it in minimal time from intent to do so.
Good eye on the colour palette, but that was actually a deliberate design choice. I found the warm ivory theme idea on Dribbble, used ChatGPT to generate mockup images of how it would look applied to HomeOS, and then used Claude to implement it. My family picked it over a couple of other options we tried. Fair point though I can see how the warm tones might look familiar if you've seen a lot of Claude-generated UIs.
Cool idea, but anything that doesn’t sync offline is useless for me as a shopping list. It is good to add things to the list while in the kitchen, but the real value is having the list available while I’m inside the walk-in cooler at Costco. Reminders in iOS syncs in the background, and is up to date on my phone and my wife’s phone.
This is cool. Yet it reminds me of a recent insight, after hours of conversation with Home Assistant geeks:
Software is not their issue. Display hardware is (but they'd never admit that).
They've usually got all their data in their Home Assistant, tracked by often > 400 individual devices & sensors, visualized in several dashboards. But rarely does anyone actually put that data into their physical spaces, because there's no obvious choice for small-sized screens, long-lasting batteries, cheap, customizable. Something like Trmnl comes close, but is too expensive for most.
So their data stays in the Home Assistant app, mostly accessible through their & their partner's phones and maybe tablets.
If someone manages to build & sell cheap, easily customizable e-ink displays in various sizes, that would enable so much more creativity with custom dashboarding. Imagine every small concern gets their own screen AND their own physical place.
Am I missing some obvious, great solutions to this?
Oh nice, I didn't know the firmware and server were open source. I've seen your products on youtube videos but only seen TRMNL as a hardware product with built-in software. Knowing you can flash a cheaper display and run your own server changes things. I'll check out the firmware repo, thanks for pointing that out.
This is so true, especially to have it more seamless in the house and a better wife acceptance factor.
I had a "discussion" on this exact subject with Claude recently, trying to figure out how to do it. The final suggestion was a mix of a regular small tablet (control center), e-ink tablet (like trmnl) for a couple status dashboards, and the part that i found the most interesting: electronic shelf labels.
There is a protocol called OpenEPaperLink that has native integration for HA, and then you can buy various size of tags on sites like AliExpress.
I have not yet tested it so it's just an LLM output for now, but I do like the idea.
I think it solves a problem for you, but I’m not sure if it’s general enough to be useful to others as well. Most of these points can also be addressed directly via Home Assistant and relevant plugins. Nevertheless, I encourage you to continue developing it so that it gains broader appeal.
P.S.: I have developed custom apps for my family myself, so I can certainly relate to the original motivation behind this.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 8.7 ms ] threadCool idea for you:
Have one of the widgets as a photo album.
Upload some images, or maybe connect to a Google Drive folder.
Then every day it shows a family photo! :)
I'm also planning to use the same Linux machine to serve family photos to our PS4 in the living room — the photos would be on an external hard drive connected to it, basically turning it into a home media server alongside HomeOS. One box quietly doing everything in the background. The photo widget would fit nicely into that setup since the images would already be on the machine.
> Manages household tasks, shopping lists, notes, prayer times, and birthdays from a single shared display.
So what does it *operate* exactly?
> No need to be pedantic
When people misuse words, we get Cloudflare-style marketing BS. Can we be better than big corps?
I want to see the mission/vision statement, the entire year calendar, quarterly/monthly goals, backlog of tasks, daily schedule all in one view with the ability to edit any of it in minimal time from intent to do so.
So therefore it stays physical. No app does this
Software is not their issue. Display hardware is (but they'd never admit that).
They've usually got all their data in their Home Assistant, tracked by often > 400 individual devices & sensors, visualized in several dashboards. But rarely does anyone actually put that data into their physical spaces, because there's no obvious choice for small-sized screens, long-lasting batteries, cheap, customizable. Something like Trmnl comes close, but is too expensive for most.
So their data stays in the Home Assistant app, mostly accessible through their & their partner's phones and maybe tablets.
If someone manages to build & sell cheap, easily customizable e-ink displays in various sizes, that would enable so much more creativity with custom dashboarding. Imagine every small concern gets their own screen AND their own physical place.
Am I missing some obvious, great solutions to this?
1. flash our* OSS firmware (https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-firmware) 2. spin up an OSS server client (https://docs.trmnl.com/go/diy/byos#implementations) 3. install the Home Assistant plugin (https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-home-assistant)
no need to write any code or give TRMNL a penny, while still benefiting from a few years of deep dev in this area.
* i'm on the team
I had a "discussion" on this exact subject with Claude recently, trying to figure out how to do it. The final suggestion was a mix of a regular small tablet (control center), e-ink tablet (like trmnl) for a couple status dashboards, and the part that i found the most interesting: electronic shelf labels.
There is a protocol called OpenEPaperLink that has native integration for HA, and then you can buy various size of tags on sites like AliExpress.
I have not yet tested it so it's just an LLM output for now, but I do like the idea.
P.S.: I have developed custom apps for my family myself, so I can certainly relate to the original motivation behind this.