Gingham GitHub

Gingham, a family wall display

Bring your own screen.

Put Gingham on an Android photo frame or an old tablet and it becomes the centerpiece of the kitchen: calendar, lists, weather and photos. The app is its own server, and it’s free. No hub, no account, no subscription.

Download the app How it’s set up

Thursday

October 8

5:42 PM

74°

Partly cloudy

H:81° L:62°

Today

Now, until 7:30 PMSoccer practice
Trash to the curb

2 sleeps until June’s birthday

Sunset 7:04 PM

October

Family Mara Theo School
Tomorrow9
81°62°
12:30 PMEarly release
Pizza night
Sat10
79°60°
Grandma Nell visiting
June turns five
9 AMFarmers market
2 PMBirthday party
Sun11
83°63°
Grandma Nell visiting
3 PMBike ride
Mon12
77°61°
1 PMBusy
3:15 PMDentist
Water the tomatoes T
Tue13
60%71°58°
7 PMBook club
Wed14
74°57°
6 PMParent night
Recycling

Later

Fri, Oct 16Book the campsite
Sat, Oct 1710 AMPumpkin patch
Fri, Oct 23Camping

A made-up family, the Ashbys. Tap the dock.

The whole thing is one app.

Whatever screen you have

Ours is a 15.6-inch photo frame that was $50 on Amazon. An old tablet in a drawer, an eBay or Goodwill find: any Android touchscreen from 8.0 on will do.

The screen is the server

The server runs inside the app, on the screen itself. Nothing else in the house has to be on. Calendar links and sign-ins stay in the app’s own private storage.

No Gingham cloud

Nothing is tracked. Besides your own calendars and lists, a frame only asks the internet for the weather and, once a day, whether a newer Gingham exists. You can turn that check off in Settings. When the internet is out, the wall keeps the last good screen and says from when.

Lists, at the wall or from a phone.

Kept by Gingham, or in Todoist, Home Assistant, a CalDAV server such as Nextcloud or Fastmail, or Google Tasks once you register a Google app of your own. Check things off with a moment to undo. A phone reaches Gingham’s own lists on the home Wi‑Fi, or from anywhere when they live on a server with https. The others go wherever their own apps go.

A list a five‑year‑old can run.

Big rows, a picture on each, and a little cheer when something gets done.

Any calendar with a link.

Google, Apple, Outlook or any other app that shares a calendar as a link. An event marked private shows as Busy. The calendar can be a week or an agenda.

Photos from a shared album, a phone or a folder.

A photo sent from a phone is made smaller and loses its location before it leaves.

Set up from a phone. No accounts, no passwords, no email.

  1. 1On a tablet, open gingham.rileysheehan.co and tap Download the app; Android asks once to allow installs from its browser. A photo frame without a browser installs it from a computer instead, step by step.
  2. 2Put it on the wall. It shows a QR code.
  3. 3Scan it with a phone on the same Wi‑Fi. No camera? Type the address beside it and enter the code.
  4. 4Paste your calendar links, make a list, pick an album.

What it runs on.

Any Android
8.0 or later, on a photo frame or a tablet. Built and tested on a 15.6-inch, 1920 × 1080 photo frame with Android 8.1 and 1 GB of memory.
The install
An APK from the latest release, not an app store. Most frames want gingham-32bit.apk (22 MB); gingham-either.apk (45 MB) runs on any Android.
Check first
Many photo frames have no browser; they install Gingham from a computer over a USB cable, step by step. A few lock their launcher so nothing else can be installed. Look for one that lets you install an APK, or use a tablet.
Updates
Settings says when a newer Gingham is out, and what’s new in it. Tap Install, confirm, and it updates in place, keeping everything. Nothing updates on its own, and an old frame keeps working.

Plain Node. No packages. No build step.

One small program, on the frame or in a container.

Read the docs Docker image

Open source, and early.

The code is on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0, with signed builds of the app and a container image in its releases.

Still to come

  • Adding and editing events at the wall
  • Calendars by sign-in as well as by link, and more places for photos
  • Lights and scenes through Home Assistant
  • What’s for dinner