Everyday use

The board is one installation shown three ways. This page covers setting up each surface and the two things households ask about most: profiles and calendar feeds.

Phones#

Open the board in the phone's browser and choose Add to Home Screen. It installs as a PWA and behaves like an app — its own icon, no browser chrome, and it keeps working when the network is flaky.

This needs HTTPS. Over plain HTTP the install prompt never appears. See HTTPS.

On a phone the navigation is four tabs around a raised centre button. That button opens a full-screen menu listing every section, the profile switcher, and Lock.

Turn on notifications per device under Settings → Notifications → Notify on this device. Each person gets event reminders and chore due-times for their own profile. On iOS the board has to be installed to the home screen first — Safari does not deliver web push to a normal tab.

The kitchen tablet#

This is the screen the board was designed around.

1. Unlock it once with the household password. Sessions last 90 days, so you are not typing it again.
2. Turn on Settings → This device → Use as wall display.

That flag is per device, not household-wide. With it on, the tablet starts the photo slideshow when it sits idle and becomes a photo frame with the clock, the weather, and today's agenda. Tap the screen or press any key to get back to the board.

Tune the behavior under Settings → Slideshow: how many minutes of idle time before it starts, seconds per photo, the transition, and whether to show the clock, the weather, and today's agenda. There is a Preview slideshow button so you do not have to wait for the idle timer to see your changes.

Views that a wall tablet might sit on all day refresh themselves — on focus, on visibility change, and on a short poll while visible — so the board on the wall does not drift out of date.

The TV#

Open /tv in the TV's browser for the big-type dashboard, or /tv/slideshow to go straight to the photos. Type scales to whatever resolution the set reports, and the pages are built for a D-pad rather than a mouse, so nothing is hover-only.

TV mode picks light or dark from sunrise and sunset by default. That is a household-wide choice, not a per-device one — set it under Settings → Appearance → TV mode theme, where you can also pin it to always light or always dark. Sunrise and sunset come from your weather location; without one it falls back to a 7am–7pm window.

Money never appears on /tv/*. Those pages run without an acting profile and the server refuses them outright.

Profiles#

Tap a name to switch. There is no password — that is deliberate, because a kitchen tablet with a per-person login is a kitchen tablet nobody uses.

What profiles do:

• Attribute events, chore completions, notes, and photo uploads to a person
• Color-code the calendar
• Drive the chore leaderboard and reward-star balances
• Carry a role: kids can only complete and redeem for themselves, adults manage chores and rewards, and admins additionally reach settings-level things like feeds, profiles, and API keys

Because switching takes no password, the admin role protects against accidents and stray API keys — not against a person standing at the tablet. That is why Money has its own PIN, and why unlocking Money ends when you switch profiles.

Manage everyone under Settings → Family members.

Calendar feeds in#

Subscribe the board to school, sports, or work calendars under Settings → Calendar feeds → Add feed. Give it a name and an .ics URL — https:// or webcal:// both work.

• The feed is fetched immediately when you add it, then refreshed on a schedule (every 15 minutes by default; each feed's own interval can be set between 15 minutes and a day).
• Imported events are read-only on the board. They expand through the same recurrence pipeline as local events, so a recurring school event behaves properly.
• Each feed gets a color, so it is obvious on the calendar which events came from where.
• Refresh now forces a fetch if you cannot wait. Removing a feed also removes the events it imported.

If the URL lives on your own network — a calendar on your NAS, say — the board refuses it by default. That is a deliberate guard, and BETTS_ALLOW_PRIVATE_FETCH_HOSTS is how you open exactly that one host. See Configuration.

Calendar feeds out#

To see the family board in a phone's own calendar app, go to Settings → Calendar feeds → Subscribe on your phone and add that URL as a subscribed calendar.

Treat the URL as a secret. It is unguessable rather than password-protected, so anyone holding it can read the family calendar. You can reset it, which invalidates the old link — every device that had subscribed then has to add the new one.

Bills from Money are not in this feed, by design. The export URL is handed to every unlocked client, so a bill on the shared calendar would be a bill published to anyone with the link.