Family Chalk Planner

The planner on a wall-mounted screen: a month calendar drawn like chalk on a blackboard, with events, a weather forecast, trash day, countdowns, a meal plan and reward jars in a Notes column. — The board on the wall.

What it does

Your real calendar. Events come from Google Calendar, any CalDAV calendar (iCloud, Nextcloud, Fastmail, Radicale) or the calendars already in Home Assistant, with Outlook and school calendars added by link. Add, change and delete them from the tablet, including repeating events, and make birthdays and big days stand out in large writing.
Draw on it. Chalk and paint-marker drawing, hand-lettered month titles in dozens of fonts, stamps, thousands of clipart pictures, chalk drawings, emoji and GIFs. The art is saved with each month.
Holiday borders that come back every year: jack-o’-lanterns in October, turkeys in November, garland in December, or pictures you pick.
Chores for every day, week and month that reset by themselves. Tick them off on the board or a phone, and give each kid a tablet that shows only theirs.
A Notes column with weather, trash and recycling days, countdowns, a meal plan, reward jars, today’s events or a photo.
Photos pinned beside the month name, and an overnight slideshow, from an iCloud or Google Photos shared album.
More than one calendar, each in its own color, plus read-only links for school or sports. A Week page, Monday starts, 24-hour times, and US, Canadian or UK holidays.
Make it yours with backgrounds from green chalkboard to cork, kraft paper and whiteboard, board styles, per-event colors and a choice of today markers.
Live. Changes on the tablet show up on the wall within a second, and the wall updates itself when you install a new version.
Part of Home Assistant. Install it as a Home Assistant app and it lives in the sidebar: your Home Assistant login is your board login, its calendars and to-do lists show up on the board, and Home Assistant updates and backs it up.
Safe for a family. Screens pair with a code, people sign in with a passkey or a password and authenticator app, and an admin console shows every sign-in, screen and change.

The board on a family touch screen, with the menu, Edit the calendar and Add event along the bottom. — A family touch screen.

Today's chores grouped by person on a tablet and on a phone, with finished chores crossed out. — Chores on a tablet and a phone.

The same month shown on four backgrounds: green chalkboard, cork, kraft paper and whiteboard. — A few of the backgrounds.

The admin console on a phone, showing screen pairing and board settings. — The admin console.

What you need

Something always on at home: Home Assistant (OS or Supervised), anything that runs Docker (a NAS, a Raspberry Pi, a server), or Debian 12/13 or Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 on amd64 or arm64. A Proxmox container with 1 CPU, 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of disk is plenty. A rented cloud server works too, kept behind Cloudflare Access or Tailscale.
A calendar: Google, iCloud or another CalDAV calendar, or the ones in Home Assistant.
A screen for the wall (any browser in kiosk mode; Fully Kiosk Browser on Android works well) and a tablet or phone for editing.

Install

The Getting started guide goes from nothing to the calendar on the wall, step by step.

In Home Assistant: add the app repository, then install Family Chalk Planner from the app store.

Turn on Show in sidebar, start it, and open Family Board. There’s no setup code: Home Assistant’s admins are the board’s admins.

With Docker:

mkdir family-chalk-planner && cd family-chalk-planner
curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joshua-d-miller/family-chalk-planner/main/compose.yaml
docker compose up -d
docker compose logs board      # shows the one-time setup code

Or directly on Debian or Ubuntu, where the git checkout is the install:

git clone https://github.com/joshua-d-miller/family-chalk-planner.git /opt/family-chalk-planner
sudo bash /opt/family-chalk-planner/deploy/install.sh

The installer adds Node.js 22 if it’s missing, a locked-down service user, a systemd service, and the optional face finder used to frame photos.

With Docker or Linux, open http://<server>:3002/admin, enter the setup code to create the admin account, and use ⚙️ Board to connect your calendar, weather town and photo album. There are no files to edit.

Updating: Home Assistant shows Update on the app. With Docker, docker compose pull && docker compose up -d. On Linux, the board installs new releases overnight by itself (a new major version waits for Update now in the admin console) and rolls back if one doesn’t start.

Using it

Where	Address
In Home Assistant	Family Board in the sidebar
Wall display	`http://<server>:3002/`
Admin console (pair screens, invite people)	`http://<server>:3002/admin`
Tablet editor	`http://<server>:3002/edit`
Chores on a phone	`http://<server>:3002/chores`

Add the tablet and phone pages to the home screen so they open like apps.

Documentation

Guide	What’s in it
Getting started	From nothing to the calendar on the wall: Home Assistant, Docker or Linux
Calendars	Home Assistant, iCloud, Google, other CalDAV, Outlook and calendar links
User guide	The tablet, family screens, kids’ tablets, chores and the wall display
Install	Debian, Ubuntu and Proxmox, HTTPS, screens and people, backups, troubleshooting
Docker	Running it with Docker Compose
Google Calendar	Connecting a Google calendar
Photos	iCloud and Google Photos shared albums, face framing
Cloud	A rented server: what’s on it, how to limit it, Cloudflare Access or Tailscale
Changelog	What changed in each release

License

Family Chalk Planner is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later. You can use, change and share it; if you run a modified version for other people, you have to offer them its source code. Third-party credits for fonts and clipart are in NOTICE.