Hello,
I have been using TrueNAS for a few years now as a simple Samba Fileshare for bulk storage and a Plex server for the house and its been great. I am now looking to do more with my home server and I would appreciate some advice / guidance on how to approach this.
I’d like to use a small pocket PC and panel mounted in my kitchen to server as a house calendar streaming our day to day, but to maintain the aesthetic like a traditional calendar, I want to have a daily rotating slideshow of our family photos to it.
Due to the sensitive nature of family pics and our personal schedules (dont need that in the cloud) I want to keep this all inside my LAN and have nothing outwardly facing.
There seems to be a multitude of ways of approaching this (cloud apps, office apps) and I am honestly not sure what the best method is. My initial thoughts was to host (apache) a small webpage and code what I wanted manually in HTML, but there are just so many ways to do this. I dont know if thats not the shortest route. Any advice if this were your project how would you go about it?
your idea kinda intrigued me, but i’m thinking about a couple of things:
using a small pocket pc just for this is not an overkill? maybe there are tricky other option that permit to stream to the monitor directly from the nas, obv involving something like a chromecast or similar
i didn’t understand how you manage your calendar, or if is just a calendar without activity/notes/ecc
EPaper, so excellent readability but of course only static content, no movies
You need a Raspberry Pi 4 for this. There are Python libs for drawing into a red/black bitmap and pushing that bitmap onto the screen. Doesn’t seem too difficult. The rest is up to you. The Pi can easily mount a nfs share from your Truenas and read data from files or from a CalDav Server etc etc.
I bought this kit a year ago, but haven’t found the time for that project. Maybe this holiday season…
Getting the calendar would be easy enough; put a web browser on the device and log it into Nextcloud (which can run on your NAS as an app). Nextcloud acts as a CalDAV server, so you can sync it to your phone(s), computer(s), etc.
The part I’m having trouble figuring out is the photos; I don’t recall seeing any eCalendar display in portrait mode with user-selectable photos at the top. But perhaps if they were used as a screen saver instead…
The first thing come into my mind Is just to use iframes into a static HTML page template. But never tried with nextcloud (despite other apps are configurabile for that)
