About DinkyDash
DinkyDash is an open-source daily dashboard for families. Every morning, it calls the Claude AI to generate a completely fresh, personalized dashboard based on your family's calendar, chores, and context — then displays it on a small screen at home.
Why an AI dashboard?
Most family dashboards show static information that someone has to update manually. DinkyDash takes a different approach: you describe your family once, and AI does the rest.
Every morning at 6am, DinkyDash automatically:
- Fetches your Google Calendar events
- Figures out whose turn it is for each chore
- Calculates countdowns to birthdays, holidays, and special dates
- Sends all of this to Claude, which writes a personalized dashboard
The result is a dashboard that feels alive. It knows it's someone's birthday week. It writes different fun facts and daily challenges every day. It adapts to what's actually happening in your family's life.
What the dashboard shows
- A daily headline — a cheerful, AI-written greeting for your family
- Person cards — each family member with their photo and key info
- Chore rotation — who does what today, automatically rotated
- Countdowns — days until birthdays, holidays, vacations, and special events
- Calendar events — what's happening today, pulled from Google Calendar
- Fun facts and challenges — something new to read every morning
- Pet corner — because pets are family too
How it's built
DinkyDash is a simple two-script system:
- generate.py runs on a cron job each morning. It fetches your calendar, builds a rich prompt, calls the Claude API, and saves the result as a JSON file.
- app.py is a tiny Flask server that reads the JSON and renders it as a dashboard in the browser.
The whole thing runs on a Raspberry Pi with a small display. No cloud accounts, no subscriptions, no app to install.
The stack
- Python 3 with Flask
- Anthropic Claude API for daily content generation
- Google Calendar (iCal) for event data
- YAML for all configuration
- Designed for Raspberry Pi with a small display (800x480)
Open source
DinkyDash is MIT-licensed and available on GitHub. It was created by Caspar.