Everyone’s week, on one wall.
FamCal is a home-built household display: a Raspberry Pi hanging in the hallway, showing the whole family’s week — every Google and Microsoft calendar in the house, merged into one read-only view. Nothing leaves the house.
— one screen for the whole household, no phones required.
How it works
Three moving parts, all of them inside the house except the calendars themselves.
Connect a calendar
Each family member grants read-only access to their Google or Microsoft calendar — nothing more. No mail, no contacts, no files: the permissions themselves won’t allow it.
The Pi keeps a local copy
A small server inside the home syncs a bounded window — roughly the past week to sixty days ahead — into its own database, so the wall is fast and the providers’ APIs are left alone.
The wall shows the week
A screen in kiosk mode displays the combined week, refreshed from the local cache. It reads; it never writes. One colour per person, one glance and you know.
What it will never do
The promises below aren’t good intentions — they’re baked into the permissions and the architecture:
- Write to your calendarsimpossible — only read-only access is ever requested
- Read email, contacts, files or photosnever requested, never reachable
- Send anything to a cloudno external hosting, analytics, ads, tracking — no cookies even
- Become a producta private household project: no accounts, no subscriptions, no price tag
Scope-deep, in other words: the OAuth permissions themselves are read-only and calendar-only, so the app couldn’t snoop further if it wanted to. The full legal wording lives in the privacy policy and terms of service.
Where it stands
Honestly: at the very beginning. This page documents a project being built in the open — slowly, in spare evenings.
Right now FamCal is a specification, a privacy policy, and a consent spike — a small proof that the Google and Microsoft sign-in flows work the way the wall display will need them to. No product code exists yet, and nothing is running on any wall.
- M0 — consent spike · in progress: proving the OAuth flows for Google and Microsoft
- M1 — sync daemon & local cache · planned
- M2 — the week grid · planned: the kiosk display itself
- M3 — on the wall · planned: hardware, mount, hallway
No dates — family projects get done when they get done.
Asked to connect your calendar?
Here’s the deal, in plain words: FamCal can look at your calendar — the events in a limited window around today — so the week on the wall includes you. That is everything it can do.
You can undo it at any moment, yourself, without asking anyone: revoke the app in your Google or Microsoft account settings and it stops immediately. Cached copies are cleared on request or on revocation.
the details, in proper legalese →
The short version
- Read-only. The app can never create, change or delete an event — or touch email, contacts or files.
- Windowed. It sees roughly the past week to sixty days ahead — not your history, not your future plans.
- Kept in the house. Tokens and cached events live on one server inside the operator’s home, on no cloud anywhere.
- Reversible. Revoke via Google or Microsoft — immediate, no permission needed.