A Family Wall That Answers "What's for Dinner?" Before Anyone Asks
With three kids, the same questions came up every day: what's for dinner, what do I have to do today, is practice tonight? The answers lived in a parent's phone, on paper or in someone's head. So I built a touchscreen for the dining room that puts the calendar, tonight's dinner and each kid's chores in one place everyone walks past.
The Same Questions, Every Day
We already plan dinners in Orchid Recipe and keep the family calendar in iCloud, but neither helps a kid who can't see a parent's phone. Chores were worse: who has which bathroom this week was something we had to remember and then remind everyone about. The information existed. It just wasn't anywhere the kids could find it on their own.
The goal was simple: anything a kid would ask a parent about the day should be answerable by glancing at the wall.
One Screen, One Glance
The calendar takes most of the screen, with month, week and day views. Everything else sits in a column on the right, in the order we actually need it during the day.
Tonight's Dinner
Pulled from our Orchid Recipe meal plan every 15 minutes, with the recipe photo and cook time. Tap it to see the rest of the week. The meal plan we were already making now answers the question for us.
Chores per Kid
Each kid gets a row with their color and initial. Chores repeat on chosen days, reset every morning, and get checked off with a tap. Finishing the last one sets off confetti.
Rotating Chores
Shared jobs like bathrooms and trash rotate between the kids every Sunday, and the wall shows who's next. A history view shows the last four weeks, so "I did it last week" can be settled by looking it up.
Color-Coded Calendar
Events sync from iCloud every five minutes. There's no tagging step: the wall reads names in the event title and colors the event for that person, so the calendar stays as easy to fill in as it always was.
Coming Up
Countdowns to the next birthday, trip or visit are picked from the calendar automatically, so the kids stop asking how many days are left.
Built to Live on a Wall
A screen that's always on in the middle of the house has different design problems than a phone app. Tap targets are large because the youngest is an early reader, and people are shown by initials and color instead of text. The screen goes black at night and wakes in the morning. The layout drifts a few pixels on a slow orbit to protect the panel from burn-in. It keeps working from cached data if the internet drops, and idles back to today's view after a few minutes so it never gets stuck where a kid left it.
Parents manage everything from a phone admin page: people and colors, chores and rotations, which cards show and in what order, and when the screen sleeps. A short PIN keeps the kids out of the settings. Seasonal themes change the accent color and add small decorations by date, so in October the wall slowly fills with pumpkins and bats leading up to Halloween.
The wall is a React and TypeScript web app on Firebase, running full screen on a small Windows PC inside a Tauri kiosk app that starts on login, updates itself overnight and restarts itself if anything hangs. I designed and built it with Claude Code, and the screenshots here use the wall's demo mode with made-up names.
The Outcome
"What's for dinner?" Dropped by a Huge Margin
The question that started Orchid Recipe mostly stopped once the answer was on the wall. The kids walk by, read it and move on.
Kids Know Their Responsibilities
Each kid can see what they need to do today and whose turn it is for the shared jobs, without asking. Checking things off is their job now, not a parent's reminder.