About a year ago we moved to a new house. The light-to-switch situation downstairs was unbelievably inconsistent. To fix that, I placed little Zigbee switches behind every light toggle, and taped Philips Hue Dimmer switches over the old physical ones. Thus began my journey into smart homes.
A year later, the biggest first world problem I had was losing time running around the house, closing all windows, before rushing out to pick up the kids from school. There's not a lot of crime around here, but if they get you, it's by learning your patterns of forgetfulness.
The obvious answer was to install Zigbee sensors on all the windows, and put a small screen next the front door.
Turns out Raspberry Pi powered color e-ink displays are actually not that expensive, so that's what I went with:
However the software side of things was rubbish.
Enter FrameOS.
It's a piece of software that SSH-s into a Raspberry Pi, and installs python scripts which display an image in a loop.
It has also slowly scope creeped its way into a visual programming environment on sorts:
This project is fresh, so expect things to break. But if you're interested in trying it out, check out the installation instructions