Family Calendar

[psd]

Our calendar has columns for each member of the family (5 of us) with each row being a day, with a week at a time in view.

It's hard for me to suggest how to make this with the current design, unless you ended up with a very long page (one week ahead isn;t enough, really) so you might want to bounce this as being out of scope, otoh it's very common requirement and might make an interesting challenge for another product!

[cefn]

Great suggestion and I love to hear about ways that people are using their calendars, whether one of ours or not.

It's remarkably easy to create new versions in terms of horizontal and vertical scale, so if you want to stick with the columnar system that could still work (giving you 4 weeks ahead in view).

I haven't tried our design double width yet, but I don't see why it should be an issue. It might be worth adding a few mm to the retaining lip around the calendar; the 3mm there at present is partly tuned to the longways flex of the current length of acrylic.

Happy to throw together a modified design with the script I have, either a generated file, cut parts at cost, or fully fabricated if you felt this kind of design might work for you.

A limitation of the current design is that it needs to have a multiple of 6 loops, in order to be sure that the next loop you grab from the top (old) can go back into the bottom (new). There's no reason the frame shouldn't be just big enough for two weeks, but if you wanted to have fewer than 6 weeks in view, you'd have to have the extra loops stashed somewhere so you can always get the numbers right.

If you don't care about the date numbers being correct, you could use a similar approach (sliding vertical panels to keep X weeks in view) and drop the articulated loops altogether.

Making a full-fledged tacticalendar which was extra wide shouldn't be too hard. I'm working with a maximum of 295mm x 595mm with the supplier I'm using right now, so you could easily have one which was the same height as the current one, but where the tiles and frame were (just a bit more than) twice as wide than the current one.

I think this might be worth fabricating and considering as an alternate design because I get a lot of feedback about how small the squares are. However, one offs (costs me £17 for each new design) and more area means more time (probably double) on the laser bed. Unless you've got access to a free laser cutter, that is :)

[cefn]

I just figured what you meant about the column per person, as I think I had it oriented wrongly in my mind. It got me thinking about the modifications we could make to accommodate for different areas for different people within the same calendar.

It's feasible to get the acrylic panels etched with anything you like. One thing worth attempting is to divide up the acrylic panels with 'horizontal rules'. That means that the calendar is re-oriented compared to yours - i.e. a row-per-person within each day.

A nice personalisation for a family would then be to have people's names etched into the wooden border of the calendar itself to match with the horizontal rules on the panels.

Using this strategy, and doubling the vertical height might give you enough room to have information per person. Combined with the Google calendar syncing, that could be pretty useful to put everyone's calendar in one system.

Regular things would just be written on the panels and left there (e.g. if you do rugby every thursday, you don't remove that). It would be possible to secure temporarily unerasable appointments with some invisible scotch tape perhaps - e.g. write on Rugby, and then cover it with a square of magic tape. Those fixed appointments would then be protected from the weekly wipe.