All ideasMore in Home
Home

The AI built our family dashboard. It only shows the bins on bin night.

He built a home dashboard with AI that pulls a dozen sources into one wall screen for the whole family. It shows the shared calendar, weather warnings, solar and battery levels, car charge and bin days, and it only brings things up when they matter, like bins out tonight or a frost warning.

How it works

  1. Build a Python server on a Mac mini with AI
  2. Pull the shared family Google Calendar every minute
  3. Add weather, flood and aurora warnings
  4. Add Tesla Powerwall, solar and Octopus Energy data
  5. Add car charge level
  6. Add bin days, school holidays and birthdays
  7. Show it full screen on a TV through a Raspberry Pi
  8. Use reviewer councils in an AI app to check each version before it changed on the wall

Why it’s worth knowing

The hard part was teaching it what not to show. Most notices stay hidden until the day they matter.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on substrate.dougbelshaw.com. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

Try next

HomeThe AI reads my 7 school WhatsApp groups and posts only what is about our daughterHomeA man in Kyiv built a tool that only pings him when drone reports come close to homeHomeSell my car end to end, from listing to licensing paperworkHomeHunt Facebook Marketplace for my new apartment's furniture and message the sellers

Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.