Google engineer open-sources Glanceboard, an e-ink family scheduler built on Gemini Flash and Nano Banana

A Google creative technologist named Raph has built and open-sourced Glanceboard, a family scheduling tool that turns calendar and weather data into a personalized illustration shown on an e-ink display, Google said in a blog post published July 31.

What's new

Glanceboard checks a family's Google Calendar and the local weather forecast, then uses Gemini 3.6 Flash to reason about what the day requires and Nano Banana to generate an illustration — for example, showing kids dressed for the day's weather with what they need to pack. The image renders on an e-ink screen rather than a phone or tablet. As Google describes it, "Glanceboard operates on a lightweight local server — no cloud accounts or bright screens required — offering a serene and personalized way to stay organized."

Raph built the project for his own household and said the goal was low-friction organization for kids: it's "a great way to get kids engaged and organized without the stress." Google has open-sourced the full project on GitHub at google-gemini/glanceboard, so other developers can adapt the calendar-plus-weather-to-illustration pattern to their own e-ink or ambient-display hardware.

Context

The post is part of Google's ongoing series spotlighting side projects its own engineers build with Gemini and Nano Banana, following a string of similar showcases this year pairing Gemini's multimodal reasoning with Nano Banana's image generation for small, practical tools rather than headline model launches. It arrives the same week Google shipped Gemini Spark's Chrome integration and a country-count expansion, part of a broader push to surface Gemini in everyday, ambient contexts beyond the chat window.

Why it matters

Glanceboard is a small-scope project, but it is a concrete, working example of chaining Gemini's reasoning with Nano Banana's image generation into a household-grade device rather than a screen-bound assistant — and Google shipping it as open-source code makes the pattern directly reusable. For a company pushing Gemini into ambient, ubiquitous-computing contexts (smart displays, wearables, and now e-ink), an official engineer-built reference implementation gives outside developers a working template, and signals Google sees value in seeding its own workforce's side projects as public proof points for what Gemini plus Nano Banana can do outside a conventional app.