Almost every drawer holds an iPad that stopped getting updates. With VistaBoard it becomes a wall display for family appointments, weather and your own solar system — no app, no extra subscription, no cloud.
An iPad 2 from 2011 or a first-generation iPad mini is not broken. The screen is fine, the battery lasts forever on mains power, and the device boots in seconds. But Apple ended support in 2016, it stays on iOS 9, and modern apps and websites no longer run on it. So most of these devices sit in a drawer — too good to throw away, too old to use.
This is exactly what VistaBoard's image mode, introduced in version 2.8.52, is for. The tablet does not show an app but an image of the running display that refreshes itself every few seconds. The reason is, honestly, a limitation: the normal VistaBoard interface needs a browser from roughly Safari 14 onwards. An iPad on iOS 9 cannot render it — but any browser in the world can show an image.
The setup is therefore different from solutions that put everything on the tablet: the hub remains a Raspberry Pi or a mini PC in your home network. That is where calendar syncing, weather requests and the connection to the solar inverter happen. The tablet is the display. This has a practical side effect: even if the iPad eventually fails, all settings and data are untouched — they live on the board.
Setting it up takes a few minutes. In Safari on the iPad you open your board's address with /bild appended — for example http://192.168.1.50:3000/bild. Then tap Share and choose "Add to Home Screen". From now on the display starts full screen without browser bars. Two iPad settings belong to it: set Auto-Lock to "Never" under Display & Brightness, and leave the device on its charger.
So the image fills the screen without black bars, the page measures the tablet's own screen area and asks the board for an image cropped to match. An iPad is 4:3, a typical monitor 16:9 — without that crop there would be a border at the top and bottom. Rotate the tablet and a new image in the new format is fetched automatically. In the board settings you choose the matching display format under Layouts: full screen, tablet landscape or tablet portrait.
What appears on the tablet is up to you. Eight templates are available: a calm board with an appointment list, weather and energy tiles; a pure solar view with self-sufficiency, generation, battery level and the daily curve; a photo mode showing your own pictures large; plus standard, pastel, landscape and more. You switch layouts on the tablet itself — one tap on the screen brings up a bar, a second one switches. No second device needed.
For the initial setup — calendar addresses, weather location, access to the solar inverter — you do use another device: phone, laptop or a newer tablet on the same Wi-Fi. The settings interface is too modern for iOS 9. That is not a detour but the usual split: configure on a computer, display on the wall device. After that you never need to touch the iPad again.
And if you later move to another device — from a PC to a Raspberry Pi, or to a new board — you save all settings as a single file at the address /umzug and load it on the new device. Calendar, weather location, solar access and layout are back immediately.
Conclusion: an old iPad is not e-waste but a finished screen with a power supply and the option of a wall mount. As a second display in the hallway, the kitchen or the office it shows the same data as the large board — appointments, weather, the yield of your own system. That is more sustainable than buying a new display, and it costs nothing extra: the licence covers the board, not each display.