Thanks to the Raspberry Pi and its expansive community, customizing your house with smart devices is easier than ever. Today, we've got a cool smart home gadget to share, put together by a maker and developer who goes by _Ctl on Reddit. Using our favorite SBC, he's created a touchscreen home dashboard full of useful features, apps, and add-ons.
This project looks great with a wooden frame and is mounted to the wall for a finished, decorative look. According to _Ctl, he can use it for media support through things like Sonos, which lets you play music or queue up videos on YouTube. It also has useful tools like a weather app and can sync with Google tools to monitor calendar events and tasks.
Maker _Ctl initially considered using an old tablet but settled on using an old touchscreen monitor he had on hand instead. This offers more space for the user interface and makes for a larger, more interactive end product. According to _Ctl, it's also handy for gaming and has proven to be a fun "pass-and-play" chess board.
The main board powering this cool home dashboard is a Raspberry Pi 5 4GB model, so you get quite a bit of flexibility and performance compared to older models or smaller versions like a Pi Zero 2W. It's connected to a 24-inch Dell P2424HT, which offers video support and touch input using USB-C. The wooden frame was built from scratch by _Ctl for this project.
In the project thread, _Ctl explained that he tinkered with a few operating system options, including Magic Mirror, but ultimately settled on LineageOS. On top of this, he's running Nova Launcher, which offers many customization options for the user interface and is more than ideal for building a custom home dashboard like this.
You can explore this Raspberry Pi project in greater detail on Reddit.
