Old iPad on the wall: photo frame that flips to weather…
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Old iPad on the wall: photo frame that flips to weather when the hallway sensor sees me, and tells me which bin goes out
Hardware is an old iPad that can't install anything from the App Store anymore, hanging in the hallway on a charger. The software side is a Home Assistant add-on I wrote called SnapFrame. Nothing is installed on the tablet itself, it just opens a fullscreen web page.
How it works: the add-on mounts an SMB share from my NAS, converts HEIC to JPG so iPhone photos work as they come off the phone, builds thumbnails in the background and serves the slideshow. Each photo shows its date and the place name from the EXIF GPS. The photos never leave the house.
The automation side: a hallway motion sensor in the morning calls a rest\_command that puts the frame into weather mode for two hours, so every 8th photo becomes a weather screen with current conditions and the next 12 hours. A second automation pushes the output of weather.get\_forecasts every 30 minutes and on state change, so what's on screen is current. There is also a corner badge that can stay up all day, or only appear when rain, snow, frost or heat is coming.
Home Assistant only ever pushes to it. The frame holds no HA token and has no API access back, which mattered to me for a device hanging in a hallway.
The part I like most is the bin reminder. It shows the day before which bin goes out, and instead of typing in a year of dates you upload the collection leaflet PDF from your municipality and it reads the dates out of it. The calendar grid gives a date per cell from the ISO week and the weekday, the coloured cells mark the collections, and the printed day number is used as a checksum so a cell that disagrees gets discarded. It all runs locally, no OCR and no API key.
The frustrating part was the browser. An iPad 2/3/Air is stuck on Safari 9 to 13, which throws away clamp(), min() and flex gap without a word, so every fluid size has a px fallback and the weather screen is laid out with tables.
It installs by adding the repo in the HA add-on store: https://github.com/emo546/ha-snapframe \- builds for aarch64 and amd64, MIT licensed.
#home
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Hardware is an old iPad that can't install anything from the App Store anymore, hanging in the hallway on a charger. The software side is a Home Assistant add-on I wrote called SnapFrame. Nothing is installed on the tablet itself, it just opens a fullscreen web page.
How it works: the add-on mounts an SMB share from my NAS, converts HEIC to JPG so iPhone photos work as they come off the phone, builds thumbnails in the background and serves the slideshow. Each photo shows its date and the place name from the EXIF GPS. The photos never leave the house.
The automation side: a hallway motion sensor in the morning calls a rest\_command that puts the frame into weather mode for two hours, so every 8th photo becomes a weather screen with current conditions and the next 12 hours. A second automation pushes the output of weather.get\_forecasts every 30 minutes and on state change, so what's on screen is current. There is also a corner badge that can stay up all day, or only appear when rain, snow, frost or heat is coming.
Home Assistant only ever pushes to it. The frame holds no HA token and has no API access back, which mattered to me for a device hanging in a hallway.
The part I like most is the bin reminder. It shows the day before which bin goes out, and instead of typing in a year of dates you upload the collection leaflet PDF from your municipality and it reads the dates out of it. The calendar grid gives a date per cell from the ISO week and the weekday, the coloured cells mark the collections, and the printed day number is used as a checksum so a cell that disagrees gets discarded. It all runs locally, no OCR and no API key.
The frustrating part was the browser. An iPad 2/3/Air is stuck on Safari 9 to 13, which throws away clamp(), min() and flex gap without a word, so every fluid size has a px fallback and the weather screen is laid out with tables.
It installs by adding the repo in the HA add-on store: https://github.com/emo546/ha-snapframe \- builds for aarch64 and amd64, MIT licensed.
#home
source
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