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Calendar Pi

Did you live your life near the turn of the century by a dry-erase calendar in the kitchen? Do you long for more visibility into your Google Calendar (or perhaps other online calendar)? Then look no further! The solution is here.

Photo of the finished product mounted on a wall near clipboards, dry-erase, and files.

Ingredients

  1. Raspberry Pi (I used model 3 B)
  2. 2.5 A USB power supply
  3. Short HDMI cable - see photo of the back
  4. 32" LCD TV with HDMI input (I got one on Craigslist for $5)
  5. Wall-mount for the TV (eBay and Amazon have them cheap)
  6. Cheap flat USB HUB - see photo of a mounted hub
  7. 8GB+ SD card
  8. Wi-Fi or ethernet where you want the calendar
  9. USB or Bluetooth Keyboard and USB mouse to help with setup
  10. Double-sided foam tape or something similar
  11. Small cable ties (a.k.a. zip ties)
  12. Duct tape

Getting the Raspberry Pi ready to turn on

  1. Get the Raspberry Pi imager for a computer near you with an SD card slot.
  2. Download the Raspbian Stretch image. Buster has an unfortunate networking bug that causes it to drop wi-fi connection after a few minutes in my installation.
  3. Use the imager to install the image to the SD card.
  4. Put it all together: Connect the HDMI cable between the Pi and the TV, connect the USB hub to the Pi. Put the SD card in the Pi, connect the power supply to the Pi, but don't plug it in yet. At this point, you should be able to see where the Pi will fit against the back of the TV. Use the double-sided tape to fix the USB hub to a back corner of the TV. Secure the cables with duct tape and cable ties. Let the Pi float, but keep it still relative to the TV. It might look something like this. Take a look at all the photos. The most fragile part of this arrangement is the micro USB power connector. Be sure the pins on the Pi aren't touching metal.
  5. Power it up, plug in the keyboard and mouse to the usb hub.
  6. Do the basic setup for your Pi - select language, keyboard style, time zone, password, etc., and set up the network. You'll use the default user "pi" to run the calendar, and this user has sudo permission by default, which will be needed.

Now select whether you want to set up from the Pi or manage from elsewhere.

Setting up just from the Pi

  1. wget https://github.com/ke4roh/rpi-calendar/releases/download/r1/calendar-install-2.run
  2. sh calendar-install-2.run

Setting up from a remote system

  1. In Pi system preferences, enable SSH.
  2. From the configuring machine, download or clone this repo
  3. SSH into the Pi
  4. ssh-copy-id to the pi (to make it oh so much easier to administer)
  5. copy hosts-localhost to a new file "hosts", and edit it, replacing "localhost" with the name or IP of your Pi.
  6. ansible-playbook playbook.yml -i hosts -u pi

Finishing up

  1. reboot the pi
  2. Log in to your Google account on the Pi
  3. Put a bow on it. You're done!