Self-hosted Appliance
Family photos in one cloud, budgets in a spreadsheet, kids' screen time in someone else's app. This project puts a family's digital life on a Raspberry Pi in the living room instead.
The Product
Family photos in one cloud, budgets in a spreadsheet, kids' screen time in someone else's app. This project puts a family's digital life on a Raspberry Pi in the living room instead.
Under the Hood
A self-hosted hub running photos, calendar, music, budgeting, a marketplace watcher, and games with virtual pets for the kids, served from a Pi 4 over the home network. Money features go deep: bank-statement import with balance reconciliation and debt tracking. The whole thing ships as a CI-built flashable OS image with three documented install paths, from a prebuilt SD card to manual setup, plus an e-ink status display module.
Deep Dive
## What we built A private family server: memories, money, and play in one self-hosted app, packaged like an appliance so setup is flash-and-boot rather than a weekend of Docker. ## Tech FastAPI backend with a React PWA, Docker Compose, a pi-gen image pipeline that bakes dependencies into a flashable SD image, e-ink display integration, and AI-assisted budgeting. ## Results A month of focused development produced a working household appliance: 68 commits, three install paths, and finance tooling that reconciles imported bank statements against tracked balances. ## What is next More family applets and broader single-board hardware support.
The Outcome
Runs a family's photos
Keep Exploring
calendar
budget
and games on a Raspberry Pi 4
CI-built flashable OS image with 3 documented install paths
bank-statement import with balance reconciliation
marketplace watcher with a hardened photo proxy
e-ink display module
68 commits in one month
