Source code for the MomBoard project

I am deeply touched by the warm response to my recent MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia post. It got much more circulation on Mastodon that I usually get, and overnight someone posted it to Hacker News — where it shot to the #1 story. I discovered this after waking up and finding my inbox full of LinkedIn requests.

The post stayed on the HN home page for two full days, which stunned me because their story ranking algorithm heavily discounts stories over time. The story got 2000+ points, more than every other post on HN that day, beating out the day’s news that The Onion bought InfoWars.

In response, I received a number of emails from people with a parent or loved one in a similar situation and wondering whether I could make the MomBoard source code available.

That was a small challenge, as the project has more in common with a home-cooked meal than a finished product. I’d written the project for a tiny audience of family members and had taken the liberty of shortcuts that wouldn’t work for others, like hard-coding people’s names.

I spent a day cleaning things up a bit and publishing the MomBoard source on GitHub.

I’ve done my best to document the “recipe” for this project in the README. It’s long and complicated, and perhaps only useful as inspiration; we’ll see. Like most home recipes, people will want to adapt the recipe to their own tastes and situation.