The Google Nest Hub beats the Skylight

We came close to buying a Skylight.

If you haven’t seen one, it’s a touchscreen calendar that sits in the kitchen and shows the whole family’s week. The big one is $630, plus $79 a year for the good features. With three kids’ worth of school and extracurricular events, I was tempted. But I really didn’t want to spend the money.

Then I looked at the Nest Hub Max that’s been on our counter for 5 years. We use it for timers and to watch YouTube TV while cooking. That’s about it. Sorry Google, but it has gotten less useful since Gemini took over.

So I spent an hour with Claude Code seeing if I could make the Hub do the job instead. It’s been on our counter for a month now, and working great!

How does a photo frame show a calendar?

You can’t install apps on a Nest Hub. But it will happily show any Google Photos album you point it at.

So a small script reads our Google Calendars, draws the week as an image, and drops that picture into an album. The Hub thinks it’s showing family photos. GitHub runs the script every couple of hours for free.

Today and tomorrow are big on the left, with what’s for dinner. The next five days are on the right. Each kid gets a colored initial, and everything else gets a little icon based on the title.

Here’s a fake sample (not my real family):

What you’ll need

• A Nest Hub or Nest Hub Max
• Google Calendar and Google Photos
• A free GitHub account
• An AI coding tool (I used Claude Code)

Setting it up

1. Paste the prompt below into your AI tool. It writes all the code.
2. Make a Google Cloud project when it asks. It’ll walk you through turning on two APIs and downloading one file. This is the fiddliest part.
3. Sign in once when the browser window pops up.
4. In the Hub’s Photo Frame settings, pick Google Photos and choose your album. Then find Personal photo curation and set it to Live albums only. (Skip this and the Hub ignores your album. I lost a couple of hours to this one.)
5. Let your AI tool put everything in a private GitHub repo. It’ll tell you which two secrets to paste in, and after that it runs itself.

The prompt I used

Just grab this an drop it in Claude or ChatGPT.

Build me a family calendar dashboard for my Google Nest Hub, shown through its Photo Frame.

A Node script should read my Google Calendars, render a dashboard image with Playwright at 1280×800, and upload it to a Google Photos album that the Hub displays. Run it on GitHub Actions every two hours so my computer doesn’t need to be on. Walk me through every setup step in plain language, one step at a time.

For the layout, put today and tomorrow on the left, larger, with dinner from my “Dinner” calendar. Put the next 5 days on the right, skipping empty days. Leave the bottom third of the left side empty, because the Hub draws its clock there. Give each family member a colored initial badge, and give other events a small icon based on the title. Never cut off an event. Shrink the text instead.

These things will break if you don’t handle them.

• Request the calendar.readonly, photoslibrary.appendonly, photoslibrary.readonly.appcreateddata, and photoslibrary.edit.appcreateddata scopes. The last one lets you pull old images out of the album.
• Tell me to publish the OAuth consent screen to Production, or the login expires every 7 days.
• Use my timezone explicitly. GitHub runs in UTC.
• Upload 5 copies of each image with slightly different EXIF timestamps. A Hub with a one-photo album falls back to stock art, and Google Photos quietly drops identical uploads.
• Only upload when the calendar content actually changed, and don’t gate runs on the clock. GitHub’s scheduled runs can start hours late.
• Embed fonts in the page instead of loading them from the web.

Before you start, ask me for my calendar names and each family member’s initial and color.

It’s a little silly

The silliest part is that the Hub won’t show an album with just one photo. It falls back to stock art. So every refresh uploads five copies of the same picture, each with a slightly different timestamp so Google Photos doesn’t toss the duplicates.

Google Photos also won’t let apps delete anything. The script can pull old pictures out of the Hub’s album, but they stay in my library. Mine also land in an archive album, so every few weeks I select all and delete.

So far it’s cost us zero dollars and one Sunday afternoon.

Anyone else doing this with a Hub or an Echo Show? I’d love to know if there’s a less silly fix than uploading the same picture five times.