About DinkyDash

DinkyDash is a free, open-source digital family calendar for screens you already own. Point a TV, an old tablet, or a Raspberry Pi at it and your family gets one glanceable screen with today's calendar, a self-rotating chore chart, countdowns to the big days — and a daily brief written fresh every morning by AI.

It was built by Caspar, an indie developer in Berlin, for his own kids — and open-sourced because a family calendar shouldn't cost $629 plus a subscription.

Why an AI-written dashboard?

Most family calendar displays show static information that someone has to curate. 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 (any iCal link works)
• 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 screen that feels alive. It knows it's someone's birthday week. It writes a different fun fact and family challenge every day, tuned to your kids' interests. Kids check it voluntarily — which is the entire battle.

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, rotated automatically and fairly
• Countdowns — days until birthdays, holidays, vacations, and special events
• Calendar events — what's happening today, pulled from your shared calendar
• Fun facts and challenges — something new to read every morning
• Pet corner — because pets are family too

The principles

• Bring your own screen. Anything with a browser works — no proprietary hardware, ever.
• No subscription. MIT-licensed, free forever. You bring your own AI API key; a day's dashboard costs a few cents.
• Private by design. Your family's details live in one config file on your own device — not in our cloud, because there isn't one.
• Boring, reliable tech. Python, a cron job, and a web page: generate.py builds the day's dashboard as JSON each morning, and a tiny Flask app renders it. It's fixable with a search engine and an afternoon.

Where to start

• Getting started guide — from zero to a dashboard on your wall
• The ~$100 DIY build — the Raspberry Pi + touchscreen route
• How it compares to Skylight, Hearth & co.
• The code, on GitHub

Want DinkyDash without the setup? A hosted version is in the works — join the waitlist.