Newbie Question. Custom Digital Dashboard

zylejas98

Hi,

I have been wanting to create a digital dashboard that would display google calendar with monthly event overview as well as daily view, time, weather, to do lists, maybe show commute time or live traffic etc. Essentially things that I might need to see for home life and work management.

I tried looking into Magic Mirror - and it looked way too complicated.
Then I tried Dakboard, and it’s a horrible subscription model that gets you to pay monthly for something that should only be paid for once - I can’t justify that.
I looked back into magic mirror and installed Magic Mirror OS - but having spent a full day on it I’m still at the same default calendar screen…
I once again, I started looking into alternatives and came across a post from 8 years ago where someone said they just created a webpage and ran that with custom CSS and all on the Raspberry.

My question is - if that is an potion (and I can edit a page with front end tools and even css very easily), why would Magic Mirror be needed ?

Or are there drawbacks to that method, maybe it doesn’t work any more as I couldn’t find any information on it apart from that post?

Any help would be appreciated as I do really feel stuck here…

sdetweil

@zylejas98 you most certainly can create your own web page, if you have the time . you will do all the same work the MagicMirror modules do today

decide on a display function, find a data provider,
get the data, design and format a display from the data, decide and implement a data refresh approach , figure out how to integrate multiple data displays, etc

MagicMirror will run just about anywhere
linux,windows,mac
its just an spp

while you are developing/composing, do it on a native machine. docker and mmos add too much extra complexity in my opinion

its a composable information panel

calendar in a list is easy, we supply the module that does that

wall cal type there are a couple which feed off the same calendar data

weather, stocks, bus/train times are available. some of the data services are becoming fee based. nothing we can do about it. if you did your own, same problem

use my install script for linux and mac, see https://github.com/sdetweil/MagicMirror_scripts

if you don’t like the config editing , try my MMM-Config module that generates a form
see https://github.com/sdetweil

i don’t provide module installation, but that is usually very easy. (see the 3rd party module list linked at the top of this forum) search is very good

consistent style, font and color will be a problem if you want that