DAKboard: a wall display for family calendars and photos

DAKboard started in 2015 as a project by Dan King, a software engineer in Syracuse, New York, who wired a spare monitor into a family calendar and photo frame for his own household. Friends asked for the same setup, and Dan King founded DAKboard, LLC in 2017; the company now runs out of a Syracuse office and makes its hardware locally (dakboard.com/about, read 2026-09-28).

The product itself is a screen you configure from a web account: pick a layout, connect your calendars and photo services, and the display keeps itself current with no further upkeep. The homepage names its audience: "Loved by 300,000+ families" (dakboard.com, read 2026-10-24). A separate business track covers office welcome boards, lobby displays and conference room schedules on the same platform.

It is not aimed at someone who wants to run their own server. Everything, including the calendar syncing and photo pulls, happens through DAKboard's own cloud account; the hardware options only decide what shows that account's output on your wall.

The pricing page lists close to 70 individual integrations across 13 groups: calendars (Google, iCloud, Office365, Facebook Events, plain ICS feeds, plus several calendar layout styles), photo sources (Google Photos, Apple Photos, Flickr, Dropbox, OneDrive, SmugMug, Immich, Reddit, Bing's photo of the day), weather (five separate provider widgets plus an air quality tile and ocean tide charts), smart home (Home Assistant, SmartThings, Nest Thermostat, Ecobee), to-do apps (Todoist, Microsoft To Do, Google Tasks, Trello, Asana), and financial, transportation and general-purpose tools like a countdown timer, a QR code generator and a raw JSON fetcher (dakboard.com/pricing, read 2026-10-24). That page also states plainly that "Essential and Plus customers have access to all of our supported integrations," which means the Free plan works from a narrower set: two calendars, weather, news and photos, without the rest of the catalog.

TouchHub is the newest piece, added in mid-2026 for touch displays and tablets. It puts a one-tap dock at the bottom of the screen for switching between your calendar, photos and weather, plus a live Home Assistant panel for lights, locks and thermostats. A Family Chores Manager sits alongside it: each family member gets a column, chores can be one-time or repeating, points convert into rewards you set, and a Child Lock stops a toddler from clearing anyone else's list. DAKboard's own announcement is specific about what each plan gets: "The base TouchHub experience and Home Assistant integration are available now on every DAKboard plan, including Free. The Chores Family Manager App is available on Essential and Plus plans only" (blog.dakboard.com, read 2026-10-24).

Create a free account at dakboard.com; no credit card is required. From there you pick a predefined screen layout (or a fully custom one on Essential and Plus), connect your calendar and photo accounts, and the screen is live.

What you actually watch it on is a separate choice. Any device with a browser works, including a smart TV's own built-in one. If you'd rather not deal with a browser, DAKboard sells a pre-loaded Micro SD card for a Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi starting at $24.95, a small plug-in CPU that turns an existing TV or monitor into a display starting at $99.95, or its own ready-to-mount Wall Display starting at $699.95, which ships with 30 days of Plus for new subscribers (dakboard.com/shop, read 2026-10-24).

Free covers one predefined screen with up to two calendars, weather, news, photos and the base TouchHub experience, with DAKboard's own branding left on the screen. Essential is $5/month billed annually, covers two custom screens (additional screens $4/month each), up to five calendars, custom screen layouts, custom CSS, community templates and the full integrations list, plus the Family Chores Manager. Plus is $8/month billed annually, covers three custom screens (additional screens $5/month each), unlimited calendars, a 500MB media library for uploaded photos, screen loops, screen scheduling and faster content updates (dakboard.com/pricing, read 2026-10-24). Hardware is separate and optional: a pre-loaded Micro SD card starts at $24.95, a DAKboard CPU starts at $99.95, and the Wall Display starts at $699.95 (dakboard.com/shop, read 2026-10-24).

The Free plan is genuinely usable but visibly limited: one screen, two calendars, DAKboard's own branding left on the display, and no custom layout, so you're working inside a fixed template rather than arranging your own blocks.

Chores are gated separately from the rest of TouchHub. The touch dock and the Home Assistant panel are free on every plan, but the Family Chores Manager itself needs Essential or Plus, a distinction easy to miss from the homepage's TouchHub pitch alone and one DAKboard's own blog post has to spell out directly.

The whole service is closed source and runs on DAKboard's own servers. There's no self-hosted option, so the calendar and photo connections you authorize live in DAKboard's cloud, and canceling a paid plan takes the gated features with it rather than leaving a local copy behind.

DAKboard's own Wall Display hardware starts at $699.95, closer to a finished appliance than a bring-your-own-screen budget pick. The CPU ($99.95 and up) and the Micro SD card ($24.95) are the cheaper routes if a spare TV or monitor is already sitting around.