AuraBoard

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Your idle screen, turned into a dashboard.

A product by DexForge

AuraBoard replaces the blank Windows screensaver with a designed ambient display — a full-screen photo or video slideshow with live widgets laid out exactly how you want them.

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<div align="center"> _{AuraBoard on the Ember theme — clock, date, weather, moon phase, countdown, system, sports and crypto over a full-bleed wallpaper.} </div>

Why AuraBoard

Your machine sits idle for hours a day showing nothing. AuraBoard turns that dead screen into something worth glancing at — the time, the weather, your next meeting, what's playing — set against your own wallpapers, in a deliberate Swiss-inspired visual language rather than the usual widget-soup.

• It looks designed. Ultra-condensed display type, one signal colour on a mono ground, hairline rules, square corners. Every widget ships in three visual variants.
• It's yours to arrange. Drag, resize and overlap widgets on a 12×12 grid. Layouts persist and survive restarts.
• It stays out of the way. Lives in the tray, wakes on idle, dismisses on input.

Features

14 widgets	Clock · Date · Greeting · Weather · Moon · Sun · Calendar · Countdown · System · Spotify · News · Crypto · Stocks · Sports
Photo & video slideshow	Point at any folder. JPEG/PNG/WebP/GIF plus MP4/WebM/MOV — videos loop, always muted
Free-form layout editor	Drag-and-drop, resize from any edge, overlap freely, per-widget style variants
4 themes	Signal · Newsprint · Cyan · Amber, with optional time-of-day palette drift
Spotify integration	Now-playing, transport controls, optional album-art background
Multi-monitor	Run on every display or pick specific ones
Photo treatments	Monochrome, duotone, or untouched — tuned for text legibility over any image

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Signal theme	Newsprint theme

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Installation

Download (recommended)

Two builds are available on the latest release:

Download	Size	Notes
AuraBoard-Setup-1.0.0.exe	80 MB	Standard installer. Bring your own wallpaper folder
AuraBoard-Setup-1.0.0-predefined.exe	498 MB	Same app, plus 4 built-in packs: Cinematic, Anime, Superheroes, Live
AuraBoard-1.0.0-portable.zip	109 MB	No installer — extract and run AuraBoard.exe

The predefined build bundles 118 wallpapers (106 images plus 12 looping 4K video wallpapers) so it works straight out of the box.

1. Download one and run it
2. AuraBoard starts in your system tray — right-click the icon for Settings

[!TIP] If your browser deletes the download, that's SmartScreen reputation filtering, not a virus — unsigned installers from new publishers get discarded automatically. Use the portable ZIP instead; archives are rarely blocked. You can also choose Keep in your browser's download list, or verify the SHA-256 published on the release first.

[!NOTE] Windows SmartScreen will warn you on first run. The installer isn't code-signed (certificates cost a few hundred dollars a year). Click More info → Run anyway. If you'd rather not trust a binary, build it yourself — it takes two commands.

Requirements: Windows 10 or 11 (x64). No runtime dependencies — everything is bundled.

Portable

Prefer no installer? Download AuraBoard-1.0.0-portable.zip, extract it anywhere, and run AuraBoard.exe. Nothing is written to Program Files and no registry keys are set — though that also means AuraBoard won't register itself as your Windows screensaver, so you'll launch it manually or add it to startup yourself.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/dexisworking/auraboard.git
cd auraboard
npm install
npm run dev          # live-reload development
npm run build:win    # produces release/AuraBoard-Setup-<version>.exe

Requires Node.js 20+ and npm.

Getting started

Once installed, right-click the tray icon:

• Settings — idle timeout, wallpaper folder, theme, widget data sources, Spotify
• Layout Editor — add/remove widgets, then drag and resize them into place
• Preview — see the board immediately without waiting to go idle

Choosing wallpapers

Open Settings → Background → Browse and point AuraBoard at any folder. It scans recursively and picks up both images and video.

Wallpaper packs

AuraBoard supports bundled wallpaper packs, shown in Settings → Background. The predefined installer ships with all four filled; in the standard installer the slots appear as Not in this build. To build your own packs:

1. Edit the PACKS array in electron/packs.js to point at your folders
2. Run npm run packs:sync to copy the media into packs/
3. Run npm run build:win — packs are bundled automatically

Use npm run build:win:nopacks for a clean, distributable build.

[!IMPORTANT] Only bundle media you have the right to redistribute. Wallpapers pulled from the internet are usually someone's copyrighted work.

Configuration

Setting	What it does
Idle timeout	Minutes of inactivity before the board appears
Interval	Seconds per slide (videos loop for the full interval)
Transition	Fade, slide, or zoom, with a slow Ken Burns drift on stills
Photo treatment	monochrome · duotone · none
Time-of-day palette	Tints the board by dawn/day/dusk/night
Poster moment	Periodically blows one element up to fill the screen

API keys for News, Stocks and Crypto are optional and stored encrypted via the OS keychain (DPAPI on Windows).

How it works

AuraBoard is an Electron app with a React renderer.

• Main process owns idle detection, window management, and a shared data layer (electron/services/) with TTL caching, single-flight de-duplication and stale-on-error fallback — so three monitors don't mean three times the API calls.
• Renderer draws the board. Widgets size themselves to their grid cell using CSS container queries, so any widget works at any size.
• Media is served over a custom auraboard-media:// protocol restricted to your chosen folders, which keeps Chromium's webSecurity fully enabled.
• Secrets go through Electron safeStorage; nothing is stored in plaintext.

Stack: Electron 33 · React 19 · electron-vite · Tailwind · react-grid-layout

Scripts

Command	Purpose
npm run dev	Development with live reload
npm run build	Build app bundles
npm run build:win	Windows installer with packs bundled, named -predefined
npm run build:win:nopacks	Windows installer with empty packs
npm run packs:sync	Copy pack media from source folders into packs/
npm run lint	ESLint

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. For a new widget, add an entry to src/widgets/registry.js with its default/min/max size, its style variants, and any per-instance settings — the layout editor and settings UI build themselves from that registry.

Privacy

AuraBoard has no server, no account, no telemetry and no analytics. Settings stay in %APPDATA%\auraboard\, and widgets call public APIs directly from your machine — the developer receives nothing. See PRIVACY.md for the full breakdown of what each widget contacts and when.

Support

AuraBoard is free and open source. If it earns a place on your screen, you can support development at buymeacoffee.com/dexisworking ☕

License

MIT © 2026 DexForge

The MIT licence covers AuraBoard's source code. Any wallpapers, artwork or media you add remain under their own licences.

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AuraBoard is built and maintained by DexForge — secure software engineering and product development.

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