I spent the long weekend setting up a home dashboard and thought I would share with this community.
I checked out a few options for this and settled on using Glance which takes a YAML as input, transforms it into a dashboard, and serves it. Its nice because it's a single executable. I have this set to run on startup on an old RPi 2, which also runs a fullscreen Chrome session pointed to localhost for display on an old monitor I had sitting around. The RPi 2 is able to run glance comfortably, it's a little slow to run Chrome but that's OK, this is not interactive. The monitor is on a remote so I can flick it on/off from my desk. I also made a "homescreen webapp" on my phone so I can jump to the same dashboard and click into any news that is interesting.
A few things I learned
- with the HEAD property you can set the page to auto-refresh. Each widget caches internally so this can be set to the quickest refresh rate needed, and only some feeds will re-populate
- you can combine multiple Lemmy community post streams into a single time-sorted "feed" using the RSS widget and the RSS link from each Lemmy community. You can also mix in other non-social news sources by adding their RSS (this worked better than the standard Lemmy community widget) So in the end I can have a nice mix of sources and there are enough of them to even populate when Lemmy isn't so active.
- to supplement the weather widget, I added live satellite and radar loops. You can get them here: satellite (look for the *.gif under GEOCOLOR for each location) and radar (click the "image loop" link to get a radar loop after picking your local radar station). Applies to US only for radar. The US runs other satellites which cover the whole world, but GOES-19 is the US east coast, pictured roughly every 20 min.
- my router (Microtik) provides nice graphs I could include so the dashboard includes a network bytes TX/RX graph for my home (this is below what is visible in the screenshot)
Here's my config
I hope this is helpful to someone!