I have added a Google Calendar integration to Timechief. See video below.

Things have been a little slow for the past few months. My father died. On the positive, I have a new job at a brilliant company. Unfortunately, these events left me with little time for the business of smart clocks. However, after some adjustment, I am now back on to developing this project.

The slow period gave me some time for reflection on where I want to go with this project. I think I’ve made something cool and I do want to share it with the world, but I’m determined to package it up into something usable for the average person first.

Here is a roadmap for what I want to create before release. It looks like I have a lot to do. I’d really love some more help, or perhaps more time to do things myself, but I have to work a job to pay the bills.

Maybe I should do some networking and see if someone can give me a hand!

Deep client support

Raspberry Pi is not the ideal hardware to ship a project. However, it’s what I’m using now. And since we want to deliver this to users ASAP, it is what we will use to go into initial production.

The shape of the initial production will be an open source client smart clock, and a website that you can use to configure the smart clock.

The client will be be distributed through pre-built Raspberry Pi disk images. I would like to sell kits, too, so people can get one pre-made.

Anyway, since we are going to target Raspberry Pi, we need deep support for the system. Outstanding items:

• Generate disk images
• Client update mechanism
• Hardware RTC support
• Client side database, currently everything comes through the web, which gives a poor UX experience on startup as we wait for first data
• Client side configuration GUI i.e. for Wi-Fi keys
• Decide on standardised kit parts

Web store

The web site that you see in the videos below is functional but there is no way to onboard new users. I would like to incorporate an off-the-shelf authn framework.

• Onboard users
• Shop to sell kits
• Sell users licenses

Deep features

I think the clock needs more features before I can lure users in. I would like to find the most popular modules on magic mirror and make sure we have the top 3, perhaps. Here are some things in the area:

• Facebook event integration
• Apple calendar integration
• Traffic
• Pollen count

Platform and extensions

I think the clock could be more pretty. I’d like to hire a web designer to create several different retro themes. Perhaps this should happen earlier, because people like pretty things, and then I could generate hype and perhaps get some help. It would be nice to have a way for users to hack in themes too, especially if this could be done with CSS only.

I have designed the system around open APIs but none of these are documented so far.

• Official themes
• User themes
• API documentation