Self-hostedLocal-firstColor e-paper
Hearth gathers the weather, your day's tasks and plans, the moon, the season and a little art into one quiet display — made for a color e-paper frame on the wall, and just as at home in a browser.
Like a fireplace, it's always on and always present, but it earns its place in the room by being calm and good to look at — not by asking for your attention.
E-paper reflects light instead of emitting it. No glow in a dark room, no power draw to hold an image — it looks like a print hanging on the wall.
The frame is designed for a few deliberate refreshes, not a live feed, so it shows only things that stay true in between — no ticking clocks, live departures or now-playing.
Everything runs on a box on your own network and stores its state there. Weather, calendar and music hookups are optional extras, not requirements.
The frame alternates between a full-bleed picture and a structured morning edition — Ambient by default, Daily when you want the day laid out.
A full-frame photograph — from Unsplash by season and category, or your own uploads — with a small card in one corner: the date, the temperature, a line about the weather, and credit for the photographer. Information stays peripheral.
A masthead with the date, season and today's sun path; two columns of widgets you arrange yourself; a five-day forecast along the bottom. Type sized to read from across the room — in full color, or a crisp black-and-white broadsheet.
The Spectra 6 panel prints with black, white, red, yellow, blue and green. Every frame theme is built only from those measured inks and a few approved two-ink mixes, so what you pick on screen is what the panel can actually show.
Also: Gallery, Harbor, Postbox, Ember and Lantern; a black-and-white mode for every theme; nine typefaces; and a portrait layout for a frame hung on its side.
Arrange the Daily columns with the same drag-and-drop editor the web dashboard uses: Today's Arc, Today, Coming Up, Week Ahead, Countdowns, Almanac, Moon Phase, Daily Quote and Birds Nearby.
Each widget trims itself to the space it's given, so a short column stays tidy and a long one fills in — no overflowing lists, no tiny print.
Hang the frame whichever way suits the wall. The Daily layout reflows for a tall panel instead of just shrinking.
The web dashboard is where you add tasks, set up integrations and arrange the frame — and it makes a fine always-on display for a spare tablet, too.
Hearth keeps its own tasks — one-offs, repeating chores, countdowns to the dates you're looking forward to — and lays them out next to your Google Calendar events.
Tick something off on your phone and every screen in the house agrees.
On a phone the dashboard becomes a single column with a tab bar — the quickest way to add a task, pick a frame theme or check what's coming up.
Widgets marked Frame also appear on the e-paper frame. The rest change too often to be right between refreshes, so they stay on screens.
The frame does almost nothing: fetch a finished picture, show it, listen for a button. Everything else happens on a small server somewhere on your network.
Add tasks, connect accounts, choose themes and lay out the frame.
A Raspberry Pi 4/5 or mini PC running Docker Compose: a SvelteKit app and eleven small .NET services behind Caddy, each with its own SQLite file.
A Raspberry Pi behind a 13.3" Inky Impression color e-paper panel, running inkypull, a small Python client.
Where it stands: the dashboard and the frame layouts are built and run today in any browser, and the inkypull client is written. The host-side step that captures and dithers the frame for the panel is next — nothing has been printed on real e-paper yet. Project status
The source is on GitHub. Run it in a browser this afternoon, then put it in a frame when you're ready.