{
  "id": 16348896,
  "title": "My spare monitor became a family dashboard, and a Raspberry Pi is all it needed",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/24/my-spare-monitor-became-a-family-dashboard-and-a-raspberry-pi-is-all",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-24T17:00:22.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "XDA Developers",
    "slug": "xda-developers",
    "url": "https://www.xda-developers.com/my-spare-monitor-became-a-family-dashboard-with-a-raspberry-pi/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Years ago, monitors often went unused, especially lower-resolution ones. My Frontech monitor, a lesser-known brand, had no purpose after my old Lenovo laptop was retired. However, the Raspberry Pi offered an ingenious solution - a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, with its 1GB of memory, was perfect for the task. Using DietPi, a lightweight Raspberry Pi operating system, the Pi ran the Home Screens dashboard, a powerful self-hosted tool.\n\nHome Screens provided an intuitive web portal for dashboard management. While touchscreen dashboards were preferred, the non-touchscreen monitor was transformed into a dashboard. The dashboard included weather, calendar, and meal planner features. The tool was installed successfully, but initial setup issues were quickly resolved through troubleshooting.\n\nThe dashboard's functionality was expanded with additional pages. A photo carousel displayed selected images, pulled from a Google Photos account. A calendar page showed upcoming events, and a meal planner page organized recipes. Users could customize the dashboard through the web portal, which also allowed remote adjustments such as screen brightness, monitor wake-up, and task alerts. These alerts were useful for reminding family members of chores or tasks.",
  "summary": "A dusty low-res monitor now anchors household life displaying weather, photo slideshows, calendars and chore alerts.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}