Family and care

For an older parent or a relative with memory loss, a clear day display helps a lot: what day it is, who's coming, and a reminder for the tablets. A viewport shows it in large, plain text, and the family can update it from anywhere.

The case for Switchboard

• Nothing to learn and nothing to press. It shows the day, the date and who’s coming. There’s no menu, no screen to unlock and no app.
• Calm, not bright. E-ink looks like paper. It doesn’t glow at night or flicker, and it reads easily from a chair across the room.
• The family keeps it up to date. Visits come from a shared calendar, so adding Sarah visits on a phone puts it on the wall at the next refresh.
• Reminders that go away. Take your tablets with breakfast shows in red until someone ticks it off in Home Assistant (or an automation does), then disappears.
• Nothing to plug in. It runs for months on a charge, so there’s no cable to trip over and no charger to remember.

Setting it up

This screen is two columns:

• Left: Weather, then a Message in red with a pill icon, shown only while a Home Assistant toggle such as input_boolean.tablets_due is on.
• Right: a large blue Message, Good {sensor.part_of_day} and It's {sensor.today_long} on two lines, then a Calendar of today and tomorrow.

A message fills in {entity_id} with the entity’s state, so a template sensor can supply morning or afternoon, or the date in words. See Viewport layouts.