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Prism User Guide

A configurable family dashboard for large wall-mounted screens, tablets, and phones. Connects to Google Calendar, Microsoft To Do, Google Tasks, OneDrive, Kroger, Gmail/FirstView, and more, surfacing the information your family actually needs in one place.

This page is the overview. For deep-dive guides on each feature, follow the links below.

First-time setup

Five quick steps:

  1. Install Prism: installation guide.
  2. Add family members: Settings → Family Members → Add Member. Each gets a name, color, avatar, role (parent or child), and a personal 4- or 6-digit PIN.
  3. Set PINs: each member has their own 4- or 6-digit PIN, chosen in the setup wizard when you first install, or later in Settings → Security. A fresh install boots straight into the setup wizard (there is no default-PIN login screen); the optional demo seed uses 1234 for every user, so change those before real use.
  4. Connect integrations: Settings → Integrations. Most families want at least Google Calendar, weather (Open-Meteo is the zero-config default), and OneDrive. See the first-time setup walkthrough.
  5. Customize the dashboard: click the grid icon to enter layout edit mode and arrange widgets.

When you're done with setup, install Prism as a PWA on phones and tablets: Mobile guide.

Logging in

Tap your avatar, enter your PIN (4 or 6 digits, depending on how it was set). The PIN auto-submits once its full length is reached. Keyboard input works too (0-9, Backspace, Enter). Sessions use a sliding window (parents stay signed in ~7 days, children 1 day) up to an absolute cap (parents 30 days, children 7 days). There is no shared-device toggle.

Roles

Action Parent Child
View dashboard & pages Yes Yes
Complete chores Yes (auto-approved) Yes (pending parent approval when the chore requires approval, otherwise approved at once)
Approve chores Yes No
Edit settings Yes No
Manage family members Yes No
Redeem goals Yes No
Exit Away / Babysitter Mode Yes (parent PIN required) No
Add tasks, messages, wishes Yes Yes
Delete others' messages Yes No
Generate API tokens Yes No

A third guest role also exists for shared-display / kiosk use: a read-only session that can view the dashboard and pages but cannot make any changes.

Features

Calendar

Multiple sources (Google OAuth + iCal subscriptions), ten view modes (Agenda / Day / List / Schedule / 1W-4W / Month / 3 Months), drag-and-drop, click-to-edit from the dashboard widget, server-side sync cron, calendar notes, hidden hours, view options menu. Mobile collapses to Agenda only.

A parent can hide an event in Prism without deleting it from its calendar (Hide in Prism in the event detail), and on a recurring Google, iCal or CalDAV event can hide the whole series. Hidden events and series are listed under Settings → Calendars, with Unhide. The same card lists birthdays and milestones, each with Remove; a removed synced birthday can be restored from Removed birthdays.

Shopping

Multiple lists with category layouts, per-person attribution, camera + USB barcode scanning, Microsoft To Do bidirectional sync, and one-click push to your online Kroger cart at any banner. The dashboard and screensaver widget hide checked items; one ticked by mistake stays for five seconds so it can be unticked.

Recipes

URL import (schema.org), Paprika import, paste-text import (OCR-friendly with ingredient sections), per-recipe photo upload, ½× / 1× / 2× / 3× / 4× scaling pills, "Add to Shopping List" with the active scale applied.

Tasks

To-do items with assignment, due dates, priorities, lists, nested grouping (Person → List), bidirectional sync to Microsoft To Do or Google Tasks.

Goals & Points

Kids earn points from approved chores. Parents set goals: recurring (allowance) or one-time (LEGO set). Waterfall allocation fills goals in priority order. Seasonal celebration animations when a goal is achieved.

Messages

Family message board. Post, pin, mark important, set expiration, edit-in-place, group by person.

Wishes & Gift Ideas

Per-member wish lists with secret claim tracking, plus private gift-idea tracking for the gift-giver side.

Photos

Local uploads + OneDrive sync with folder picker. Geotagging powers the Travel Map photo strip. Used by the screensaver, dashboard wallpaper, and slideshow widget.

Travel Map

Interactive 3D globe for tracking visited places, bucket-list destinations, and multi-stop trips (route / loop / hub). Geotagged photos auto-link to nearby pins.

Weekend Ideas

Family activity board for local places to visit. Backlog, visited tracking, ratings, tags, favorites.

Bus Tracking

School bus arrival predictions via Gmail/FirstView email parsing. Adaptive polling, route auto-discovery, AM/PM trips per student.

Display Modes

Screensaver, Away Mode, and Babysitter Mode: three overlay modes that layer on top of the dashboard for idle, privacy, and caregiver scenarios. While Babysitter Mode is on, the sitter can leave a note for the family on the Messages board.

Themes

Five colour palettes, chosen under Settings. The palette is set once for the whole house; light and dark stay per-screen. Every palette is checked for readability before it ships, and ?theme=default recovers a display with no keyboard.

Mobile & PWA

Installable as a PWA on iOS, Android, and desktop. Phone viewports get a Floating Action Button (FAB), simplified single-column dashboard, and agenda-only calendar.

Integrations

Other features (covered inline below)

A few smaller surfaces are documented here rather than on dedicated pages.

Chores

The flip side of Goals & Points. Parents create chores with a frequency (daily / weekly / biweekly / monthly / quarterly / semi-annually / annually) and a point value. Kids mark complete; on a chore with Requires approval on (the default) a parent approves, and on one with it off the points count at once; points flow into the goals waterfall. Each chore can have a custom reset day (which day of the week for weekly chores, which day of the month for monthly, MM-DD for annual).

Views: Group by Person (cards per family member), List view (sortable), History (recent completions with approval status). Approved chores stay visible for 24 hours.

Meals

Weekly meal planner. Plan meals by day + meal type (breakfast / lunch / snack / dinner); each meal can carry an optional time of day (defaulting to breakfast 7am / lunch 12pm / snack 3pm / dinner 6pm) used for calendar placement. Link recipes from the Recipes library so opening a planned meal jumps to its recipe. Mark as cooked to track. Drag between days, including from the dashboard Meals widget on touch devices. Filter the week by one or more meal types using the breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack pills. Pull a meal plan from Tandoor or Mealie via Add ▾ → Sync meal plan… (review-and-approve; imported meals bring their recipes along). Week starts on your configured day (Settings → General → Week Starts On).

Performance Mode

Auto-enabled on devices reporting ≤2 GB RAM or ≤4 CPU cores. Stretches polling intervals ~2.5×, renders Photo widget as a single static image instead of a slideshow, dials back animations. Lightning-bolt badge appears in the dashboard header while active. Override in Settings → Appearance → Performance Mode.

Settings reference

A short tour of Settings. (Each section's deep behavior is documented in the linked feature pages above where relevant.)

  • Account & Profile: current session and default display user.
  • Family Members: add / edit / remove members. Names, colors, avatars, roles, sort order.
  • General: weather location (city or postal code), time zone, Week Starts On.
  • Integrations: one card per provider brand: Google (Calendar, Tasks), Microsoft (To Do, OneDrive), Gmail (bus tracking), Apple / CalDAV, Kroger (shopping cart push), plus Photo Sources. Per-list Task / Shopping / Wish List sync is mapped inside the Microsoft or Google provider card.
  • Text Size: how large everything reads on each dashboard.
  • Appearance: Color Scheme (Light / Dark / System), Theme Palette, Seasonal Theme, Performance Mode, Screensaver (start delay, photo rotation, widget transition effect and its options, drift), Auto-Hide Navigation / Away Mode / sign-out timers, Orientation Override.
  • Photos: manage sources (Local, OneDrive, Immich); folder picker; display filters (orientation, resolution); GPS backfill; pinned wallpaper / screensaver.
  • Bus Tracking: Gmail connection, route configuration, route auto-discovery, Gmail label filter.
  • Input: on-screen keyboard and barcode-scanner toggles. The keyboard has a household switch and a per-device choice (Use household setting / Always / Never), so a tablet can use its own keyboard while a wall display keeps Prism's.
  • Babysitter Info: emergency contacts, house info (WiFi password stored AES-256-GCM encrypted), child info, house rules.
  • Features: show / hide individual nav pages.
  • Security: PINs + API tokens (with Voice / Full scope picker).
  • Backups & Data: create, download, restore, or delete database backups. Includes dangerous operations (Truncate, Seed demo data) gated behind explicit confirmation. On an install that started with the demo family, a Demo data card purges it.
  • Activity Log: filterable log of every action taken in the app.
  • About: version, links, re-run the setup wizard.

Calendar management (enable / assign / color synced calendars, iCal subscriptions, and Calendar Hours) is no longer a Settings section. It now lives behind the Manage button on the Calendar page.

Installing as PWA

See the dedicated Mobile & PWA guide for OS-specific steps and tips.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut Where Action
0-9 PIN pad Enter digit
Backspace PIN pad Delete last digit
Enter PIN pad Submit
Escape Modals Close
Ctrl+Enter Message edit Save
Ctrl+B Calendar notes Bold
Ctrl+I Calendar notes Italic
Ctrl+U Calendar notes Underline
Ctrl+Shift+S Calendar notes Strikethrough
Ctrl+Shift+L Calendar notes Bullet list
Ctrl+Shift+M Layout editor Toggle measure mode

Troubleshooting

For feature-specific troubleshooting, each feature page has its own section:

Common gotchas:

Forgot PIN

A parent can set a new PIN for a child or guest without the old one, in Settings → Security → Change PIN. A parent's own PIN, and a co-parent's, still need the current one; a parent who forgot theirs can be reset with scripts/reset-pin.js on the server.

Stuck in Away or Babysitter Mode

A parent PIN exits both modes. If you forgot it, run docker exec prism-db psql -U prism -d prism -c "UPDATE users SET pin='\$2a\$12\$...' WHERE role='parent';" to manually reset. See the install guide for details.

"Failed to save" / "Failed to add"

Error messages now propagate the actual server-side reason in v1.8. If you see "rate limit exceeded", wait a minute and retry. Other failures will surface the underlying issue (validation error, database constraint, etc.).

Widget not loading

Refresh the page (Ctrl+Shift+R for a hard reload). For PWA installs: uninstall + reinstall.

Support