Every morning was the same scene in our kitchen: everyone pulling out phones to check the weather, looking up the school bus schedule, double-checking the family calendar. Phones getting sticky while cooking, getting lost in breakfast chaos, running out of battery at the worst times. Then I looked at the old iPad mini 2 sitting in my drawer — too old for modern apps, but with a perfectly good screen.
Spoiler alert: now when this display occasionally goes black, my family gets completely disoriented. It went from “cute weekend project” to “mission-critical kitchen infrastructure” faster than I expected.
The Setup
Here’s what I used:
- iPad mini 2 (any old tablet would work)
- Basic aluminum tablet stand ($12)
- Regular charging cable
- Power outlet near the fruit basket
- Kiosk app from the App Store (keeps the screen on and shows the dashboard full-screen)
My husband handled the backend (he’s the developer in this household — I just tell him what I want on the screen). Here’s what he set up:
- WordPress installation on a
Linode server (managed via 
SpinupWP) - Custom plugin for local transit times
- Custom plugin for Google Calendar integration
- Public WordPress weather plugin
- Some basic theme modifications
Adding Transit Times
This was the part that made the biggest difference for our mornings. Most cities have a public transit API you can pull real-time arrival data from. Here’s a working example using London’s Transport for London API — the same approach works with your local transit authority’s data feed:
$url = 'https://api.tfl.gov.uk/StopPoint/{your-stop-id}/Arrivals';
$response = wp_remote_get($url);
$body = wp_remote_retrieve_body( $response );
$data = json_decode( $body );
usort($data, function($a, $b) {
return strtotime($a->expectedArrival) - strtotime($b->expectedArrival);
});The pattern is the same everywhere: hit the API, get arrival times, sort them, display the next few. Swap in your city’s transit API and you’re done.
Adding Google Calendar
This was non-negotiable for me. If I can’t see who has soccer practice and when the dentist appointment is, the whole display is decorative. The calendar integration pulls today’s events from a shared Google Calendar using the iCal format:
use ICal\ICal;
function get_todays_events($url){
$ical = new ICal($url);
$today = date('Y-m-d');
$events = $ical->eventsFromRange($today . ' 00:00:00', $today . ' 23:59:59');
return $events;
}Configuring the Display
The key to making this work was keeping it simple. The display shows exactly five things:
- Current time (digital, because my kids complained about analog)
- Today’s date
- Current weather and forecast
- Next few arrivals from our nearest stop
- Family calendar for today and tomorrow
That’s it. No fancy widgets, no complex dashboards, no smart home controls. Just the stuff we check twenty times a day anyway.
Stuff That Might Trip You Up
If you’re setting this up yourself, watch out for these gotchas:
- Screen dimming: Your iPad will try to be helpful and dim the screen after a few minutes. A kiosk app overrides this and keeps it bright and full-screen.
- Stale data: WordPress caching can make transit times outdated. Set your cache TTL low (or exclude the dashboard page from caching entirely).
- Calendar rate limits: Google Calendar has API rate limits. Cache the response for 15 minutes — your schedule doesn’t change that fast.
- Midnight reloads: Some browsers try to refresh at midnight and lose the full-screen state. The kiosk app handles this too.
All the Things I Worried About (That Didn’t Matter)
Before I started, I had all these concerns. Here’s how I worked through them:
“Won’t keeping it plugged in 24/7 kill the battery?”
Look, it’s an old iPad that was sitting in a drawer. If being plugged in eventually kills the battery… so what? Best case: it keeps working for years. Worst case: it dies and I can finally recycle it with a clear conscience.
“What about screen burn-in?”
Modern LCD screens are pretty resistant to burn-in. But even if it happens — again, so what? This is a dedicated display now. It’s not like I’m going to go back to using it as a regular tablet.
“How do you keep it from going to sleep?”
This one’s actually simple: I used a kiosk app from the App Store. It keeps the screen on and displays the dashboard full-screen. No need to fight with iOS settings or worry about overnight restarts.
“Isn’t this overkill just for showing basic info?”
Ask my family when the display occasionally goes black. The collective disorientation suggests not. Sometimes the “proper” solution isn’t the simplest one, but it’s the one that actually works for you.
“What about security?”
It’s just displaying a webpage. No sensitive data stored on the device, no banking apps, no personal photos. If someone really wants to hack my shopping list and see that we need oat milk, they can have at it.
“What if X breaks?”
Then it breaks. The whole setup cost me a $12 stand and some time. The iPad was just gathering dust anyway. This is about making something useful, not precious.
The Real Test
You know something’s actually useful when it breaks. Every now and then the dashboard goes black for whatever reason, and suddenly:
- “Do we need jackets today?”
- “What time is it?”
- “Is there anything on the calendar?”
- “When do we need to leave?”
Somehow this old iPad became mission-critical kitchen infrastructure. Not bad for something that was gathering dust a few months ago.
If you want a more detailed walkthrough — from picking the right tablet to choosing apps and mounting options — check out our complete kitchen display guide. It covers everything step by step, no dev skills required.
The Code
All the code mentioned above is available on GitHub: 
https://github.com/dashpadd/
The setup does require some comfort with WordPress development and API integration. But if you’ve got an old tablet lying around and some dev skills, you might be surprised how useful it can become.
Got questions or want to share your own setup? Drop them in the comments below — I’d love to see what you’ve done with your old tablet.
