AURORA × ECHO-DASHBOARD
how it's built features repos
self-hosted · LAN-only · no cloud

A bedside smart display
with no cloud, no subscription.

Built from an old Echo Show 5 and the phone already in your pocket. Two small open-source projects that talk to each other over your own Wi-Fi. Nothing else is in the stack.

Aurora echo-dashboard
HOME WI-FI PHONE Aurora NanoHTTPD :8080 DISPLAY echo-dashboard Echo Show 5 · LineageOS GET /dashboard every 30s JSON snapshot
architecture

Two repos. One LAN. Zero servers you don't own.

The system is split cleanly along the phone/display boundary, and each half is its own small, independently-buildable project.

backend · runs on phone

Aurora

rustyisacat/Aurora

An Android app (Kotlin) with essentially no UI beyond a settings/customize screen. Its job is to run a local HTTP server and expose one JSON snapshot.

  • Embedded NanoHTTPD server, GET /dashboard
  • Foreground service that only serves while on home Wi-Fi
  • Control endpoints (Bedside Mode triggers, DND, etc.)
  • Reads phone state: battery, notifications, calendar
view repo →
frontend · runs on display

echo-dashboard

rustyisacat/echo-dashboard

Plain HTML/CSS/JS kiosk app with no build step and no framework. Polls Aurora and renders the whole bedside experience client-side on the repurposed Echo Show.

  • Polls /dashboard every 30 seconds
  • Weather via Open-Meteo, everything else fully offline
  • Runs as a kiosk web app on stock LineageOS
  • Degrades gracefully when Aurora is off Wi-Fi
view repo →
No cloud account. No subscription. No third-party server anywhere in the stack.
Both devices only ever talk to each other, over the home network.
feature set

Everything a bedside display needs, nothing it doesn't

All rendered client-side on the display, driven by the snapshot Aurora serves.

Weather & radar

Current conditions, forecast, radar, air quality, and severe alerts via Open-Meteo.

Wake alarms

Alarms that ring right on the display, no phone needed at the moment they go off.

Ambient sound machine

Bedside white noise / rain / ambience, playing locally on the display.

Bedside Mode

One tap dims the screen, enables real system DND on the phone, and starts ambient sound.

Ambient Mode screensaver

Idle-timeout photo crossfade screensaver that takes over when nobody's looking.

8 theme reskins

Wallpaper rotation with dominant-color-driven accent theming across eight full themes.

Phone status

Battery, notifications, and calendar pulled straight from the paired phone.

Offline Night Sky

Planets and a real star map computed from classical orbital mechanics, with no network required.

LAN-only, always

Aurora only serves while on the configured home Wi-Fi, so nothing is ever exposed externally.

There's also a phone-free solo variant of the dashboard that doesn't require Aurora at all. It's a separate project with its own site, not covered here.
source

Both repos, MIT-free and fully open

Clone them, read them, run them on your own hardware.

rustyisacat / Aurora Kotlin Android app. Local HTTP server + settings UI. The phone-side backend. github.com/rustyisacat/Aurora
rustyisacat / echo-dashboard Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS kiosk app. No build step. The display-side frontend. github.com/rusty-workshop/echo-dashboard