the hearth project

Our family wall display, liberated from rented software.

the hearth project is the software running on our 27-inch family wall display. It lives in our hallway. It replaced subscription software I did not want to pay for.

The display company charges $9 a month for software with no dark mode. At night, that means a glowing white rectangle in the hallway renting you your own chore chart.

The idea

I wanted the wall display to feel like part of the house, not a SaaS product taped to the wall. Family software should be fast, quiet, legible from across the hallway, and forgiving when children use it with breakfast hands.

The joke version is that I got mad about dark mode and accidentally built a small operating system for the house.

The real version is that the hallway is a better place for some kinds of software than a phone. Morning routines. Chores. Rewards. Calendar context. Little missions. A shared place where the family can look together instead of each person checking a private rectangle.

But the rule is important: it is a tool, not a friend. That matters especially for children. I have designed a kids’ voice avatar for the wall, but I have not built it yet because the rules had to be written before the character existed. The wall can help. It does not get to pretend it loves them.

What exists today

• the hearth project is running on our family wall today.
• It has a dark theme that does not light up the hallway at night.
• The interface is fast enough that children do not have to wait for the software to remember it is software.
• Morning routines can run as head-to-head races.
• My daughter’s flame is rose.
• My son’s flame is blue.
• The kid interface has big Done buttons because small targets are silly on a wall.
• Points accumulate and can be spent on real rewards.
• Chores, routines, and calendar information all live on the display.
• A kiosk app points the display at a small home server.
• A receipt-printer service called sparks is built.
• Sparks prints missions and secret codes on a little thermal printer.
• The designed-but-not-built voice avatar has documented rules: tool, not friend.

This is one of those projects where the boring physical facts matter. The display is portrait. It is in a hallway. People pass it at different heights. A kid will hit the button harder than an adult. A white screen at midnight is not a small issue if it is near bedrooms.

What it isn’t yet

the hearth project is not a product. It works in exactly one home: mine.

There is no installer. There is no account system. There is no onboarding flow. There is no supported hardware list. There is no cloud service. There is no promise that anyone else’s wall, family routine, calendar setup, printer, or tolerance for tinkering will match ours.

The voice avatar is not built. That is intentional. The more emotionally present the interface becomes, the more careful the rules need to be. I am not interested in putting a fake friend in the hallway because a demo would look cute.

The display company could also change something that makes the current setup annoying. That is the nature of liberating a rented rectangle.

Where it’s going

The plan is not to turn every family into a sysadmin. If this becomes something more than our house software, it has to be calm enough for normal family life.

First, I want to keep running it in our hallway until the rough edges are not theoretical. Morning is a real test. Bedtime is a real test. Two kids arguing about who tapped Done first is a real test.

Second, I want to hear from people who have our 27-inch family wall display and the same irritation. The useful next version might be a small guide. It might be a downloadable setup. It might be a tiny hosted service. I do not know yet.

The real goal is simpler: a family wall should belong to the family. It should not glow at you all night because somebody forgot dark mode and found a subscription.