Building the First UpBoard: How a COVID Project Turned Into a Business

Back in 2020, when the world went into full lockdown mode, I needed a project to keep my son (and honestly, myself) from going stir-crazy. I wanted him to learn something useful, something that wasn’t just video games or Netflix marathons, so we started mucking around with Raspberry Pis. Little coding projects. Tiny screens. Nerd stuff.

Somewhere along the way, we stumbled across digital family calendars online. They looked slick... until you saw the price.
Thousands of dollars. For what? A screen and some code? We thought, "Screw that. We can build one ourselves. So we did.

Using an old monitor someone gave us for free and a Raspberry Pi we already had, we built our first family calendar. No frame. No fancy setup. Just a bare screen running our family schedule. And it worked. It worked so well, in fact, that it became part of our daily life. No more missed soccer games. No more last-minute birthday gifts. No more "I forgot to pay that bill" moments.

It sat there, rough as guts, for a couple of years, and everyone who saw it said the same thing: "Where can I get one of those?"

That’s when we realised we might be onto something. Of course, no one wanted a beaten-up old screen hanging in their house, so we started framing them properly, sourcing better screens, custom-building the computers, and refining the whole process, step by step. Every version got better. Smoother builds. Cleaner designs. Real Tasmanian Oak frames. Fully integrated setups.

What started as a simple COVID project turned into Young Sandwich Media, a business built on doing it better, for less, and without the rubbish. And honestly? We’re just getting started.