10 ms·

Zenreader: A 4.7" E-Ink RSS Reader

352 points by ca98am79 5y ago

thisisastopsign 5y ago
Does anybody have an idea how much this ESP32/M5Paper setup cost the author? Buying individual components ; not bulk
- wiremine 5y ago
  I found this link which says $85. https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-kit-960x540-4-7-eink-display-235-ppi https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-...
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Very similar, but without the case, $37.45: https://www.tindie.com/products/ttgo/lilygo-t5-47-inch-e-paper-esp32-v3-version/ https://www.tindie.com/products/ttgo/lilygo-t5-47-inch-e-pap...
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  Was there a big run of 4.7 inch eink screens recently? Lilygo has a similar set of products: 4.7" screen powered by ESP32 with different battery connectors, touch screen overlay, and a few case options (some of which are basically just repurposed phone bodies). Theirs comes out to ~$50 if you get touch + a case
- m_eiman 5y ago
  There’s also Inkplate: https://inkplate.io/ https://inkplate.io/
carlob 5y ago
Everybody loves to complain about the kindle browser, but the one on the kobo is actually decent...
nubela 5y ago
You know what will be nice? Having pocket app run on this.
- input_sh 5y ago
  Kobo devices come with built-in Pocket support. Not a great Pocket support (for example: no highlights), but reading experience is fine.
- whikhngbu359 5y ago
  I tag things in my Pocket with "kindle" and they are picked up by pocket2kindle [0] daily. [0] - https://p2k.co https://p2k.co
devindotcom 5y ago
Kobo readers have Pocket built in. Would be nice to have straight RSS too but I send long reads to my reader all the time. reMarkable has a Chrome extention to send stuff to its devices, though it's a bit less seamless.
- input_sh 5y ago
  KOReader is fairly straightforward to install on a Kobo and it supports RSS: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/News-downloader https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/News-downloader You don't even have to say goodbye to original firmware, you can just restart into original. Its interface leaves a lot to be desired though.
  - pinusc 5y ago
    I'd say KOreader interface is not pretty, but it gets the job done quite well—and certainly with a lot more features & customization than stock.
    - input_sh 5y ago
      > but it gets the job done quite well I don't know, I often find myself having to click random things to find the feature I'm looking for, even having to fall back to DDG a couple of times because I cannot find what I'm looking for.
      - hpfr 5y ago
        I just got a Kobo and went with Plato[1] over KOReader and it's been great for my purposes so far. Fewer features, but it has everything I need and performs even better than KOReader (it's written in Rust by the developer of bspwm/sxhkd and isn't carrying as much legacy baggage as KOReader, which has a longer history) with a very straightforward interface. It also has support for hooks, with a Wallabag integration as the example. 1: https://github.com/baskerville/plato https://github.com/baskerville/plato
- dleslie 5y ago
GloriousKoji 5y ago
> The idea is to transform XML RSS to JSON and transform any article URL to plaintext by a nodejs script via an HTTP API SaaS or whatever you call it. So not really an RSS reader.
- croshan 5y ago
  So critical. So some parsing is done off the device due to performance constraints. You'll need internet access anyway to pull down the RSS feeds, and a middleman Lambda/CF worker won't add much latency. I think it's a perfectly acceptable tradeoff.
- input_sh 5y ago
  I actually prefer this approach. Basically go around websites not serving full articles via RSS by parsing them via Readability or mercury-parser or whatever. Can't back it up, but I'm pretty sure some online RSS services use the same trick. Makes for a better UX than "click here to read the full story".
sdlion 5y ago
There are available eInk with a DSI interface and Linux drivers? It shouldn't be that hard to build a DIY eInk slim tablet with a PiZero or for some, with a CM4.
andrewstuart2 5y ago
> I'm not making the server code available now, because it is messy and runs on duck-tape now. I feel like this is an unfortunately common take. "If it's not widely used, or pretty, or innovative, it's not worth sharing." Chances are I've seen more duct tape on production code than whatever simple hacks you've done to make the server work. If it works and it's not going to leak your personal data or credentials, just share it. Anybody who's judging you by the state of your repos clearly doesn't understand that coding is iterative and happens better in the open, and is probably safe to ignore. Even if you never get a single star or MR, it's now out there to at least be something people can learn from. And really, all you've done is increase the chances that you might learn from somebody else, or help somebody else out.
- jimmies 5y ago
  Author here. I was actually somewhat worried that someone gonna get to my Pi that has some other stuff running on it, because I am absolutely not doing any security and sandboxing on this nodejs server... But I guess you made a good point, here you go :) Welcome to the wonderful world of random code copy-and-pasted from Stackoverflow! https://gist.github.com/htruong/692b1bca7b94db20051b601c89a44de9 https://gist.github.com/htruong/692b1bca7b94db20051b601c89a4...
  - bakatubas 5y ago
    I found a vulnerability! ... Just kidding. :)
  - opan 5y ago
    Could you add a LICENSE file?
    - jimmies 5y ago
      I have edited the code on the link above and added the license text.
  - mixcocam 5y ago
    What you built is super cool. If I would like to hack on an m5paper myself what ressources would you recommend that I start with to kick off a small project?
yosito 5y ago
I've been using an Onyx Boox Note with inoreader for a few months, and it's not super polished, but it's a great device if you're interested in an e-ink RSS reader! It runs de-googled Android out of the box, so it can run most apps. Some of my other favorite apps to use on it are it's integrated ebook reader with pen support and integrated machine translators, F-Droid, Firefox, Nextcloud to sync my ebook collection with Calibre, and Materialistic for reading HN. I've also got Twidere for Twitter, Frost for Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Messenger and Goodreads on it, but I'm trying to wean myself off of those platforms.
- criddell 5y ago
  I've read that Onyx isn't living up to the terms of the GPL by refusing to make their source code available: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735962
  - yosito 5y ago
    Oh yeah, I definitely wouldn't say that Onyx is a super trustworthy company. Nor is the OS super secure or trustworthy. A fully open source OS would be better, and the bootloader is unlocked, so if I had the time I could try to install a better OS. But right now most of my hacking energy is focused on my getting my Nextcloud system fully setup. I see the actual devices themselves as interchangeable.
- waldfee 5y ago
  check out KoReader [0] from the F-Droid Store, imho it's way better than the built-in onyx reader app. [0] https://koreader.rocks https://koreader.rocks
ladyanita22 5y ago
I've got to say I love the Constantia font, but is it open source? Won't you have problems with it?
- jimmies 5y ago
  I was testing different fonts on my personal device. The font was not shared in the source code release.
clint 5y ago
There are a lot of services (I think Amazon may even maintain a Chrome extension for this) that can take a web page and run it thru a "readability" service and then deliver it to your Amazon Kindle's email address which will add it to your library. Its a pretty decent way to read a good chunk of the content you find online.
- k1m 5y ago
  Yes, I work on one such service here: https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/ https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/
  - mhaymo 5y ago
    Do you have any solution for RSS to Kindle? I would happily pay to have my RSS feeds delivered straight to my Kindle. In fact I just today paid for https://app.newslettertokindle.com/ https://app.newslettertokindle.com/ for very similar reasons.
bobajeff 5y ago
This reminds me of 68k.news. Which already has inspired me to think about doing something similar only for the whole web. I think I could scale it down to be usable on a smart watch too.
dstaley 5y ago
I have one of these M5Paper devices, and it's quite nice! I quickly ran into issues drawing nice UIs, so my app actually runs server-side and sends back a PNG that the M5 simply renders to the screen. Is it the fastest thing in the world? Absolutely not, but it makes a great ambient display that's only refreshed every few minutes.
cptrp2101 5y ago
These are really cool. As someone who mostly writes code for web, this seems like a fun way to learn a new stack.
- ficklepickle 5y ago
  Absolutely! I'm also a web person and I got into embedded as a hobby using ESP8266 w/ the Arduino IDE (The ESP32 is a newer, better ESP8266). I cannot recommend it enough. I've built some neat stuff, like this device[0] for triggering my door buzzer over the web. [0] - https://jeremypoole.ca/posts/put-your-door-on-the-internet/ https://jeremypoole.ca/posts/put-your-door-on-the-internet/
MrJagil 5y ago
Plenty of E-ink news on HN lately. There’s an active discord hacking away if you’re interested: https://discord.gg/DTXpkCRu https://discord.gg/DTXpkCRu
pinusc 5y ago
A while ago I made Morning Digest [1] with a similar use case: to read the news on my eReader, and do so prettily. The end result is a daily epub "newspaper", auto-delivered to my device. It's essentially a complicated script that I run on a server every 24 hours to fetch news from rss lists, and compile them on a (very long!) epub or pdf, complete with index and good typography. It even gets around a few paywalls thanks to a couple tricks, and the output is complete articles with reasonable/good output quality. I then have a script on my kobo to fetch the daily digest every morning when I open it. On a kindle you could just have a script email the result to it. Overall I'm really happy with it, it's the perfect solution to read the news for me. [1]: https://github.com/pinusc/morning-digest https://github.com/pinusc/morning-digest
- robterrell 5y ago
  Checking it out and I think you're missing a requirement: readability-lxml maybe?
- funksta 5y ago
  I built something very similar that formats RSS/Twitter/etc feeds into a pdf that gets automatically pushed to my reMarkable tablet 2x daily. It's so much nicer to use than reading news online!
dredmorbius 5y ago
There are numerous e-ink devices that support browsers, typically running Android, though Kobo is straight-up Linux. Mind that a DIY option would likely be far superior from a privacy / antisurveillance perspective. I picked up an Onyx BOOX a couple of months ago. The stock browser is a slightly modified (and slightly crippled) Chromium fork. Via F-Droid, I've installed Fennec Fox (mobile Firefox), and other browsers are available. There are some benefits, and compromises, to e-ink displays. Pixels are cheap, paints are expensive, persistence is free, colour is unavailable (well, on grayscale devices, there are now full-colour e-ink displays at not-unreasonable prices). My biggest persistent gripes are: - Scrolling on e-ink really is not how you want to navigate, pagination is much preferred. Neither browsers nor most other apps support paginated navigation. - The assumption that I'm using a palm-sized full-colour emissive display, rather than a monitor-sized, greyscale, reflective one, means that most "mobile-optimised" apps and websites are highly frustrating. I've inquired in a few places (including HN) about what app design guidelines / practices exist for e-ink. Apparently there are none. This is disheartening.
- Latty 5y ago
  There is a CSS media query "update" that would in theory allow sites to switch from scrolling to pagination with CSS on devices that do slower updates like e-ink. Unfortunately no browser seems to support it yet. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/update-frequency https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/upda...
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Nice. In CSS Level 5, "update", "color", and "resolution". https://www.w3.org/TR/mediaqueries-5/ https://www.w3.org/TR/mediaqueries-5/
- II2II 5y ago
  > I've inquired in a few places (including HN) about what app design guidelines / practices exist for e-ink. Apparently there are none. This is disheartening. That probably has a lot to do with the intended audience of e-ink. The most consumer facing application are e-readers, a market that is served by a handful of companies. Most of the remaining applications are commercial. With respect to guidance, you may want to check out the Mobileread forums. There are a few people who develop software for e-readers there. Notably in the section for Kobo, and likely for other e-readers as well. There are also some open source projects that you can look into. KOReader and Plato come to mind. I also recall a mention of an e-ink guideline in a video by Ralph S Bacon on YouTube, so there is something out there. (Apparently colour e-ink displays should be refreshed at a regular, albeit long, interval in order to maintain image quality.) I realize that most of these source are for palm-sized, or smaller, screens but at least they will understand the physical properties of e-ink.
mattkevan 5y ago
That looks cool! Just had the thought that it could be used as a handheld Gemini Protocol reader. Gemini (or Gopher) being lightweight and text-only could fit really well.
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
I gave up on the idea of RSS on an e-reader because RSS is garbage on the vast majority of websites these days. Most of those that support it will only show you the headline and maybe the first paragraph before including a link to the full article. So you're then still opening the article in a web browser to view it--which then sends you back to the well-known "Experimental web browser on Kindle/Kobo/other e-Ink reader is crap" problem). There were only a handful of sites where I could do meaningful article reading within the RSS reader itself, and one of them (ArsTechnica) required paying a yearly membership fee for the personalized full-article RSS feed. It's far less convenient, but just running the articles through Pocket makes for a superior reading experience (particularly on the Kobo), since Pocket will extract and display only the readable text, and avoid the nightmare that is trying to display your average webpage on an e-Ink reader browser.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  Why not feed your RSS reader into ArchiveBox (or Pocket if you prefer) then? Get the full source in your preferred format.
- samatman 5y ago
  I'm plenty annoyed about RSS becoming steadily more difficult to use. I have to run an extension in Firefox to get an RSS icon in the address bar, which is just sad. That said, I'm finding that for Substack, at least, RSS works just fine. You get the whole article, no fuss, and it works the way it should, it's just https://example.substack.com/feed https://example.substack.com/feed. I'm pleased to see Substack do most things right. I almost wonder if their pitch deck explicitly said "we will zig every time Medium zagged".
- rtpg 5y ago
  Guess it depends on the site cuz I have had pretty much excellent experiences overall using RSS on anything (the worst feeds are tech blogs with hand rolled software that end up messing up their RSS feeds every 3 months leading to full resyncs)
- k1m 5y ago
  > Most of those that support it will only show you the headline and maybe the first paragraph before including a link to the full article. If you'd like to turn partial feeds into full-text versions, the project I work on might help. Doesn't work on all feeds, but will work on many: http://ftr.fivefilters.org/ http://ftr.fivefilters.org/
vongomben 5y ago
Cool! One thing I love from kobo is the pocket integration that makes the asynchronous online reading much simpler
totetsu 5y ago
Koreader which can be installed on many devices (with some coercion) can download news feeds. https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/News-downloader https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/News-downloader Calibre can also download them and output them to e-pub and push them to your device.
crazygringo 5y ago
> I don't know what the folks at Amazon were thinking when they make the browser suck this much. I've heard it's quite simple: the browser was only ever included in the first place as a way to log into public Wi-Fi networks like coffee shops which have a screen you need to log in through. As long as the browser is good enough to log you in, Amazon's happy. Which is why, after almost 10 years, I think the browser is still labeled as "experimental". (At least last I checked.)
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Especially since they were footing the bill for cell data with the early devices, it's hard to imagine they'd really want you to use it for Web surfing for sure. But the device also isn't very well suited to that.
  - paulcole 5y ago
    For years, I used my Kindle + Google Voice as my portable “phone.” I’d get voicemails (transcribed) and text messages to my Gmail and could text back from there. Gmail even had a lite version that worked quite well on the Kindle’s experimental browser. Fortunately, my needs for making/receiving an actual call on-the-go were nearly non-existent so it worked quite well. Was really sad when they pulled the plug on the free 3G.
  - Anther 5y ago
    I have a Kindle Oasis.it has a permanent e-sim connection to their store which I was surprised about. I don’t pay for its use.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      You have to pay extra for that model, I believe.
    - websites2323 5y ago
      You pay in all the behavioral data they get to harvest from being always connected
blhack 5y ago
Very cool! Unfortunately, the paper (the hardware device this is using) is sold out, and M5 doesn't know if they're ever going to make it again: https://twitter.com/M5Stack/status/1376691939018350593 https://twitter.com/M5Stack/status/1376691939018350593 Would LOVE one of these devices, but unfortunately I don't know if I'll get to have one. Really hope to see more devices that are this form factor in the future. I loved my palm pilot way back when, and would love to be able to replace it.
sgtnoodle 5y ago
Could the raspberry pi intermediary approach be used to format the data in a way that's more palatable to the Kindle's built-in browser? If you're going to spoon feed the ESP32, why not spoon feed the Kindle?
lukewrites 5y ago
The Onyx Boox e-ink devices run Android and have wifi. I sync my Pocket account (using the app) and read via RSS. They’re great devices, and you can even download the Kindle app and read your DRM’d books on them :)
znpy 5y ago
It really looks like what e-readers should have been all along.
villgax 5y ago
Need an app or reliable set of steps to make an old phone or tablet a reader for anything
pugz 5y ago
My workflow for very similar needs: 1. Come across interesting long-form articles on the Internet 2. Click the "Save to Pocket" icon in my browser (some time passes) 3. Read these articles on my Kobo e-ink reader using the Pocket app. It works really well.
ftth_finland 5y ago
Shameless plug: I made a (free) very simple RSS reader for Kindle e-ink devices. It works with the built-in web browser. https://kreader-app.github.io/ https://kreader-app.github.io/

352 points by ca98am79 5y ago

thisisastopsign 5y ago

Does anybody have an idea how much this ESP32/M5Paper setup cost the author? Buying individual components ; not bulk

wiremine 5y ago
I found this link which says $85. https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-kit-960x540-4-7-eink-display-235-ppi https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-...
- tyingq 5y ago
  Very similar, but without the case, $37.45: https://www.tindie.com/products/ttgo/lilygo-t5-47-inch-e-paper-esp32-v3-version/ https://www.tindie.com/products/ttgo/lilygo-t5-47-inch-e-pap...
Rebelgecko 5y ago
Was there a big run of 4.7 inch eink screens recently? Lilygo has a similar set of products: 4.7" screen powered by ESP32 with different battery connectors, touch screen overlay, and a few case options (some of which are basically just repurposed phone bodies). Theirs comes out to ~$50 if you get touch + a case
m_eiman 5y ago
There’s also Inkplate: https://inkplate.io/ https://inkplate.io/

carlob 5y ago

Everybody loves to complain about the kindle browser, but the one on the kobo is actually decent...

nubela 5y ago

You know what will be nice? Having pocket app run on this.

input_sh 5y ago
Kobo devices come with built-in Pocket support. Not a great Pocket support (for example: no highlights), but reading experience is fine.
whikhngbu359 5y ago
I tag things in my Pocket with "kindle" and they are picked up by pocket2kindle [0] daily. [0] - https://p2k.co https://p2k.co

devindotcom 5y ago

Kobo readers have Pocket built in. Would be nice to have straight RSS too but I send long reads to my reader all the time. reMarkable has a Chrome extention to send stuff to its devices, though it's a bit less seamless.

input_sh 5y ago
KOReader is fairly straightforward to install on a Kobo and it supports RSS: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/News-downloader https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/News-downloader You don't even have to say goodbye to original firmware, you can just restart into original. Its interface leaves a lot to be desired though.
- pinusc 5y ago
  I'd say KOreader interface is not pretty, but it gets the job done quite well—and certainly with a lot more features & customization than stock.
  - input_sh 5y ago
    > but it gets the job done quite well I don't know, I often find myself having to click random things to find the feature I'm looking for, even having to fall back to DDG a couple of times because I cannot find what I'm looking for.
    - hpfr 5y ago
      I just got a Kobo and went with Plato[1] over KOReader and it's been great for my purposes so far. Fewer features, but it has everything I need and performs even better than KOReader (it's written in Rust by the developer of bspwm/sxhkd and isn't carrying as much legacy baggage as KOReader, which has a longer history) with a very straightforward interface. It also has support for hooks, with a Wallabag integration as the example. 1: https://github.com/baskerville/plato https://github.com/baskerville/plato
dleslie 5y ago

GloriousKoji 5y ago

> The idea is to transform XML RSS to JSON and transform any article URL to plaintext by a nodejs script via an HTTP API SaaS or whatever you call it. So not really an RSS reader.

croshan 5y ago
So critical. So some parsing is done off the device due to performance constraints. You'll need internet access anyway to pull down the RSS feeds, and a middleman Lambda/CF worker won't add much latency. I think it's a perfectly acceptable tradeoff.
input_sh 5y ago
I actually prefer this approach. Basically go around websites not serving full articles via RSS by parsing them via Readability or mercury-parser or whatever. Can't back it up, but I'm pretty sure some online RSS services use the same trick. Makes for a better UX than "click here to read the full story".

sdlion 5y ago

There are available eInk with a DSI interface and Linux drivers? It shouldn't be that hard to build a DIY eInk slim tablet with a PiZero or for some, with a CM4.

andrewstuart2 5y ago

> I'm not making the server code available now, because it is messy and runs on duck-tape now. I feel like this is an unfortunately common take. "If it's not widely used, or pretty, or innovative, it's not worth sharing." Chances are I've seen more duct tape on production code than whatever simple hacks you've done to make the server work. If it works and it's not going to leak your personal data or credentials, just share it. Anybody who's judging you by the state of your repos clearly doesn't understand that coding is iterative and happens better in the open, and is probably safe to ignore. Even if you never get a single star or MR, it's now out there to at least be something people can learn from. And really, all you've done is increase the chances that you might learn from somebody else, or help somebody else out.

jimmies 5y ago
Author here. I was actually somewhat worried that someone gonna get to my Pi that has some other stuff running on it, because I am absolutely not doing any security and sandboxing on this nodejs server... But I guess you made a good point, here you go :) Welcome to the wonderful world of random code copy-and-pasted from Stackoverflow! https://gist.github.com/htruong/692b1bca7b94db20051b601c89a44de9 https://gist.github.com/htruong/692b1bca7b94db20051b601c89a4...
- bakatubas 5y ago
  I found a vulnerability! ... Just kidding. :)
- opan 5y ago
  Could you add a LICENSE file?
  - jimmies 5y ago
    I have edited the code on the link above and added the license text.
- mixcocam 5y ago
  What you built is super cool. If I would like to hack on an m5paper myself what ressources would you recommend that I start with to kick off a small project?

yosito 5y ago

I've been using an Onyx Boox Note with inoreader for a few months, and it's not super polished, but it's a great device if you're interested in an e-ink RSS reader! It runs de-googled Android out of the box, so it can run most apps. Some of my other favorite apps to use on it are it's integrated ebook reader with pen support and integrated machine translators, F-Droid, Firefox, Nextcloud to sync my ebook collection with Calibre, and Materialistic for reading HN. I've also got Twidere for Twitter, Frost for Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Messenger and Goodreads on it, but I'm trying to wean myself off of those platforms.

criddell 5y ago
I've read that Onyx isn't living up to the terms of the GPL by refusing to make their source code available: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735962
- yosito 5y ago
  Oh yeah, I definitely wouldn't say that Onyx is a super trustworthy company. Nor is the OS super secure or trustworthy. A fully open source OS would be better, and the bootloader is unlocked, so if I had the time I could try to install a better OS. But right now most of my hacking energy is focused on my getting my Nextcloud system fully setup. I see the actual devices themselves as interchangeable.
waldfee 5y ago
check out KoReader [0] from the F-Droid Store, imho it's way better than the built-in onyx reader app. [0] https://koreader.rocks https://koreader.rocks

ladyanita22 5y ago

I've got to say I love the Constantia font, but is it open source? Won't you have problems with it?

jimmies 5y ago
I was testing different fonts on my personal device. The font was not shared in the source code release.

clint 5y ago

There are a lot of services (I think Amazon may even maintain a Chrome extension for this) that can take a web page and run it thru a "readability" service and then deliver it to your Amazon Kindle's email address which will add it to your library. Its a pretty decent way to read a good chunk of the content you find online.

k1m 5y ago
Yes, I work on one such service here: https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/ https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/
- mhaymo 5y ago
  Do you have any solution for RSS to Kindle? I would happily pay to have my RSS feeds delivered straight to my Kindle. In fact I just today paid for https://app.newslettertokindle.com/ https://app.newslettertokindle.com/ for very similar reasons.

bobajeff 5y ago

This reminds me of 68k.news. Which already has inspired me to think about doing something similar only for the whole web. I think I could scale it down to be usable on a smart watch too.

dstaley 5y ago

I have one of these M5Paper devices, and it's quite nice! I quickly ran into issues drawing nice UIs, so my app actually runs server-side and sends back a PNG that the M5 simply renders to the screen. Is it the fastest thing in the world? Absolutely not, but it makes a great ambient display that's only refreshed every few minutes.

cptrp2101 5y ago

These are really cool. As someone who mostly writes code for web, this seems like a fun way to learn a new stack.

ficklepickle 5y ago
Absolutely! I'm also a web person and I got into embedded as a hobby using ESP8266 w/ the Arduino IDE (The ESP32 is a newer, better ESP8266). I cannot recommend it enough. I've built some neat stuff, like this device[0] for triggering my door buzzer over the web. [0] - https://jeremypoole.ca/posts/put-your-door-on-the-internet/ https://jeremypoole.ca/posts/put-your-door-on-the-internet/

MrJagil 5y ago

Plenty of E-ink news on HN lately. There’s an active discord hacking away if you’re interested: https://discord.gg/DTXpkCRu https://discord.gg/DTXpkCRu

pinusc 5y ago

A while ago I made Morning Digest [1] with a similar use case: to read the news on my eReader, and do so prettily. The end result is a daily epub "newspaper", auto-delivered to my device. It's essentially a complicated script that I run on a server every 24 hours to fetch news from rss lists, and compile them on a (very long!) epub or pdf, complete with index and good typography. It even gets around a few paywalls thanks to a couple tricks, and the output is complete articles with reasonable/good output quality. I then have a script on my kobo to fetch the daily digest every morning when I open it. On a kindle you could just have a script email the result to it. Overall I'm really happy with it, it's the perfect solution to read the news for me. [1]: https://github.com/pinusc/morning-digest https://github.com/pinusc/morning-digest

robterrell 5y ago
Checking it out and I think you're missing a requirement: readability-lxml maybe?
funksta 5y ago
I built something very similar that formats RSS/Twitter/etc feeds into a pdf that gets automatically pushed to my reMarkable tablet 2x daily. It's so much nicer to use than reading news online!

dredmorbius 5y ago

There are numerous e-ink devices that support browsers, typically running Android, though Kobo is straight-up Linux. Mind that a DIY option would likely be far superior from a privacy / antisurveillance perspective. I picked up an Onyx BOOX a couple of months ago. The stock browser is a slightly modified (and slightly crippled) Chromium fork. Via F-Droid, I've installed Fennec Fox (mobile Firefox), and other browsers are available. There are some benefits, and compromises, to e-ink displays. Pixels are cheap, paints are expensive, persistence is free, colour is unavailable (well, on grayscale devices, there are now full-colour e-ink displays at not-unreasonable prices). My biggest persistent gripes are: - Scrolling on e-ink really is not how you want to navigate, pagination is much preferred. Neither browsers nor most other apps support paginated navigation. - The assumption that I'm using a palm-sized full-colour emissive display, rather than a monitor-sized, greyscale, reflective one, means that most "mobile-optimised" apps and websites are highly frustrating. I've inquired in a few places (including HN) about what app design guidelines / practices exist for e-ink. Apparently there are none. This is disheartening.

Latty 5y ago
There is a CSS media query "update" that would in theory allow sites to switch from scrolling to pagination with CSS on devices that do slower updates like e-ink. Unfortunately no browser seems to support it yet. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/update-frequency https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/upda...
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Nice. In CSS Level 5, "update", "color", and "resolution". https://www.w3.org/TR/mediaqueries-5/ https://www.w3.org/TR/mediaqueries-5/
II2II 5y ago
> I've inquired in a few places (including HN) about what app design guidelines / practices exist for e-ink. Apparently there are none. This is disheartening. That probably has a lot to do with the intended audience of e-ink. The most consumer facing application are e-readers, a market that is served by a handful of companies. Most of the remaining applications are commercial. With respect to guidance, you may want to check out the Mobileread forums. There are a few people who develop software for e-readers there. Notably in the section for Kobo, and likely for other e-readers as well. There are also some open source projects that you can look into. KOReader and Plato come to mind. I also recall a mention of an e-ink guideline in a video by Ralph S Bacon on YouTube, so there is something out there. (Apparently colour e-ink displays should be refreshed at a regular, albeit long, interval in order to maintain image quality.) I realize that most of these source are for palm-sized, or smaller, screens but at least they will understand the physical properties of e-ink.

mattkevan 5y ago

That looks cool! Just had the thought that it could be used as a handheld Gemini Protocol reader. Gemini (or Gopher) being lightweight and text-only could fit really well.

AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

I gave up on the idea of RSS on an e-reader because RSS is garbage on the vast majority of websites these days. Most of those that support it will only show you the headline and maybe the first paragraph before including a link to the full article. So you're then still opening the article in a web browser to view it--which then sends you back to the well-known "Experimental web browser on Kindle/Kobo/other e-Ink reader is crap" problem). There were only a handful of sites where I could do meaningful article reading within the RSS reader itself, and one of them (ArsTechnica) required paying a yearly membership fee for the personalized full-article RSS feed. It's far less convenient, but just running the articles through Pocket makes for a superior reading experience (particularly on the Kobo), since Pocket will extract and display only the readable text, and avoid the nightmare that is trying to display your average webpage on an e-Ink reader browser.

vorpalhex 5y ago
Why not feed your RSS reader into ArchiveBox (or Pocket if you prefer) then? Get the full source in your preferred format.
samatman 5y ago
I'm plenty annoyed about RSS becoming steadily more difficult to use. I have to run an extension in Firefox to get an RSS icon in the address bar, which is just sad. That said, I'm finding that for Substack, at least, RSS works just fine. You get the whole article, no fuss, and it works the way it should, it's just https://example.substack.com/feed https://example.substack.com/feed. I'm pleased to see Substack do most things right. I almost wonder if their pitch deck explicitly said "we will zig every time Medium zagged".
rtpg 5y ago
Guess it depends on the site cuz I have had pretty much excellent experiences overall using RSS on anything (the worst feeds are tech blogs with hand rolled software that end up messing up their RSS feeds every 3 months leading to full resyncs)
k1m 5y ago
> Most of those that support it will only show you the headline and maybe the first paragraph before including a link to the full article. If you'd like to turn partial feeds into full-text versions, the project I work on might help. Doesn't work on all feeds, but will work on many: http://ftr.fivefilters.org/ http://ftr.fivefilters.org/

vongomben 5y ago

Cool! One thing I love from kobo is the pocket integration that makes the asynchronous online reading much simpler

totetsu 5y ago

Koreader which can be installed on many devices (with some coercion) can download news feeds. https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/News-downloader https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/News-downloader Calibre can also download them and output them to e-pub and push them to your device.

crazygringo 5y ago

> I don't know what the folks at Amazon were thinking when they make the browser suck this much. I've heard it's quite simple: the browser was only ever included in the first place as a way to log into public Wi-Fi networks like coffee shops which have a screen you need to log in through. As long as the browser is good enough to log you in, Amazon's happy. Which is why, after almost 10 years, I think the browser is still labeled as "experimental". (At least last I checked.)

emodendroket 5y ago
Especially since they were footing the bill for cell data with the early devices, it's hard to imagine they'd really want you to use it for Web surfing for sure. But the device also isn't very well suited to that.
- paulcole 5y ago
  For years, I used my Kindle + Google Voice as my portable “phone.” I’d get voicemails (transcribed) and text messages to my Gmail and could text back from there. Gmail even had a lite version that worked quite well on the Kindle’s experimental browser. Fortunately, my needs for making/receiving an actual call on-the-go were nearly non-existent so it worked quite well. Was really sad when they pulled the plug on the free 3G.
- Anther 5y ago
  I have a Kindle Oasis.it has a permanent e-sim connection to their store which I was surprised about. I don’t pay for its use.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    You have to pay extra for that model, I believe.
  - websites2323 5y ago
    You pay in all the behavioral data they get to harvest from being always connected

blhack 5y ago

Very cool! Unfortunately, the paper (the hardware device this is using) is sold out, and M5 doesn't know if they're ever going to make it again: https://twitter.com/M5Stack/status/1376691939018350593 https://twitter.com/M5Stack/status/1376691939018350593 Would LOVE one of these devices, but unfortunately I don't know if I'll get to have one. Really hope to see more devices that are this form factor in the future. I loved my palm pilot way back when, and would love to be able to replace it.

sgtnoodle 5y ago

Could the raspberry pi intermediary approach be used to format the data in a way that's more palatable to the Kindle's built-in browser? If you're going to spoon feed the ESP32, why not spoon feed the Kindle?

lukewrites 5y ago

The Onyx Boox e-ink devices run Android and have wifi. I sync my Pocket account (using the app) and read via RSS. They’re great devices, and you can even download the Kindle app and read your DRM’d books on them :)

znpy 5y ago

It really looks like what e-readers should have been all along.

villgax 5y ago

Need an app or reliable set of steps to make an old phone or tablet a reader for anything

pugz 5y ago

My workflow for very similar needs: 1. Come across interesting long-form articles on the Internet 2. Click the "Save to Pocket" icon in my browser (some time passes) 3. Read these articles on my Kobo e-ink reader using the Pocket app. It works really well.

ftth_finland 5y ago

Shameless plug: I made a (free) very simple RSS reader for Kindle e-ink devices. It works with the built-in web browser. https://kreader-app.github.io/ https://kreader-app.github.io/