Hi brains trust - I have an issue that I'm solving on behalf of my brother.
Situation:
Picture a busy family (2 adults, two school age children) using a single calendar in their kitchen to help organise their busy life. School events, medical appointments, work schedules, frequent travel, family visits, holidays etc are all recorded in pencil on a large format paper calendar.
The calendar needs to be frequently amended, adjusted, tweaked and it gets really messy to the point it's often illegible. In addition, stuff like work schedules can change rapidly and often the calendar doesn't get updated.
Proposed solution:
Set up a digital calendar syncing with parent's shared Google calendars, displaying in the kitchen and able to be edited remotely via phone. Ideally, the calendar could also updated on the calendar device itself.
Brother and kids are quite familiar with technology. Brother's wife not so much - she can use her phone without issues, but doesn't deal well with complications or unintuitive interfaces. Any solution needs to be very simple and straightforward.
There are a couple of decent commercial products available (Skylight and Hearth are two I know of) but they are very expensive and require subscription fees to get full functionality. So DIY is preferred, with a max. budget of say $300.
Considered options:
Cheap Android tablet in a mount/frame
Very easy, but a relatively small screen isn't very appealing. Ideally the screen should be 15" or more for easy reading from a few steps away. Android tablets larger than 13" seem to be rare and/or expensive. Also leaving a tablet plugged in all the time is generally not good for them.PC monitor with an Android/RaspPi/Windows stick to run it, and a BT keyboard/mouse device for editing.
All components are quite cheap, but probably annoying to use.Old Samsung phone running Dex, connected to 15-18" touchscreen portable monitor.
This one is favoured by my brother, since he already has a suitable phone. But I'm not sure what kind of hub/dock would be required to power the phone, transmit video to the screen, and also power the screen itself. The concern of leaving the phone constantly powered also applies to this option.Ideas please?
All ideas and advice welcomed
<Update for extra clarity>
1. The kids don't have their own devices, and won't have them for a few years yet. Hence the need for shared hardware, with the ability to add/edit.
2. Google Calendar has all the functionality required - the software part of this problem is already sorted. My question is centred about appropriate hardware.
Maybe look at skylight calendar as a ready to go solution instead. Warning some features look to be paywalled.
No idea how good it is but I am getting bombed with ads for it lately.
The marketing makes it look like a seamless and painless solution which could be most ideal.