Kitchen Tablet Dashboard
Kitchen Tablet Dashboard
Summary
Mount an old tablet in the hallway as an always-on dashboard for calendar, weather and bin day. Abandoned 2026-08-10 — see the Log. Superseded by hallway-display-build, which solved the same problem with e-ink.
Use Cases
| Need | Why |
|---|---|
| Calendar at a glance on the way out | Nobody checks their phone in the hallway |
| Weather / coat decision | Every morning |
| Bin day | The actual motivating problem |
Hard- and Software
| Option | Cost | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Old tablet, wall-mounted ✅ (chosen, then abandoned) | €0 | Already owned; colour; touch | Needs power; screen is a light source; battery degrades if left charging |
| Buy a dedicated panel | ~€120 | Purpose-built | Expensive for the problem |
Selected: the old tablet — on the reasoning that a device already owned is free, and free is hard to argue with.
That reasoning turned out to be wrong, and the way it was wrong is the useful part of this page. See the Log.
Plan / Phases
Phase 1 — Software ✅
- Dashboard page rendering calendar, weather, bin day
- Kiosk-mode browser, screen-on lock
Phase 2 — Mounting ✗ (never started)
- Wall mount and cable routing
Open Questions
- Can the screen be dimmed enough at night? → No, not usefully. Minimum brightness was still a visible glow in a dark hallway.
- Is there a power socket within reach? → No. This was the decisive one.
Log
[2026-08-10] Abandoned — three reasons, in order of decisiveness
- No power socket within reach of the wall. Running a cable was the entire original problem and this design reintroduced it. Should have been checked in week one; it was assumed rather than measured.
- The screen is a light source. Minimum brightness was still a glow in a dark hallway at night. An always-on display in a hallway has to be invisible when unlit, and an LCD can’t be.
- Battery degradation. A tablet left permanently on charge swells within a year or two. “Already owned, therefore free” ignored the cost of destroying the thing.
The generalisable mistake: “free because already owned” was treated as a decision rather than a constraint to test. The tablet was free; making it work was not.
Superseded by hallway-display-build — e-ink needs no power to hold an image, emits no light, and runs months on a battery. All three failures above became the requirements that picked it.
[2026-07-30] Project created
Dashboard page built and running in a browser within the first session.