19 ms·

I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper

221 points by mfld 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
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BadHumans 2y ago
Kids are getting scheduling via apps now? The best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it. I've finally reached that "back in my day" age. It's a neat project though. I wasn't aware Soldered existed so this is a nice find.
- mfld 2y ago
  They still have a paper planner. :) But checking the app each morning is mandatory. And in my son's case, there are changes every couple of days.
  - didntcheck 2y ago
    This is a nice project, but personally I'd favor demanding that the school come up with an alternate solution for your son that doesn't require you to supply smartphone. Rather than allowing them to shift the burden to you
  - al_borland 2y ago
    Why would there be so many changes? Do they seem legitimate, or more like they are trying to justify spending money on the scheduling system and playing with the new toy?
    - mfld 2y ago
      It is more related to sick leave and general scarcity of teachers. I guess before the existence of timetable apps they were better in finding creative ways around those changes.
      - nemomarx 2y ago
        In my experience, teacher absences just meant substitutes, another teacher swapping over / handling two classes, or an impromptu class period spent watching something on tv. I'm not sure that was much better than just telling the students in advance when you know a schedule will change and sending them to the library to study or etc.
  - crtasm 2y ago
    The app or the website, right? If this is your blog please add "Show HN: " to the title here.
    - mfld 2y ago
      Correct. And thanks for the remark.
    - beala 2y ago
      I don't think there is a rule that your own work must be tagged with Show HN. You can opt-in to Show HN if > you've made something that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. [1] but afaik nothing in the guidelines [2] requires it. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - crtasm 2y ago
        I see - thankyou
  - dragonsky67 2y ago
    It's no wonder that kids are so stressed/anxious these days, seems not even their school classes are certain.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    Looks like a very chaotic school.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  This is hardly new. My high school did this over fifteen years ago. This app just shows hour+subject+teacher+room number. Quite useful on days the hours/rooms get switched around because a teacher is on leave. Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance). It's hardly comparable. As for this project, I'm not sure how wise it is to build something that relies on scraping some unknown third party website when it comes to school schedules. I'd risk it for my own schedule, but if your scraper makes a mistake you'll get your kid in trouble. Maybe the teacher will believe "it's because my parents made this scheduling contraption" as an excuse, but they'll only accept it once or twice if they do. If there's any app I'd completely unlock in parental controls, it's this one, because it only seems to do the bare minimum anyway.
  - mfld 2y ago
    Good points. However unlocking the phone in the morning puts my son on the wrong track: you would be surprised how much time one can spend checking animated gifs by using any text field that will inevitably be unlocked as well. Of course I will take full responsibility in case of bugs... So far it didn't happen.
    - TRiG_Ireland 2y ago
      It's not just kids. It would put me on the wrong track too.
    - jeroenhd 2y ago
      I applaud your efforts to keep your son from being addicted to screens. While I'd be more conservative in the setup (I'd probably go with a device without inputs that turns on just to browse to a website directly, making any browsing mistakes or changed layouts less impactful), I do wish there were better alternatives for parents than "hand your kid a smartphone". In an ideal world, schools would use some kind of one-way messaging devices to get the benefits of modern technology without the addiction smartphones bring, but I don't think we'll see that any time soon. Perhaps something like a (locked-down) Remarkable e-Ink tablet with a cellular network connection to receive school notifications and schedule updates as well as for doing homework in could prove quite useful, but that also sounds way too expensive for schools at the moment and you'd need to lock it down so that it's no more distracting than a piece of paper.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  i don't think there is much value in teaching a paper planner
  - II2II 2y ago
    With many schools banning mobile phones, and similar communications devices, there aren't many alternatives to paper. Also, my elementary school uses paper planners. Given that most elementary schools forbid students from carrying electronics (for no other reason than loss and damage), there isn't much of a choice except paper planners.
    - whimsicalism 2y ago
      sure as long as you are allowed to use your own notebook for planning and not graded based on formatting in a certain way
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  > The best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it. While in general I'm a fan of "learn how to do things by hand for didactic value" (e.g. learning how to do long division before using the calculator to do it), I don't think a paper planner provides any didactic value to learn before replacing it with an electronic calendaring tool.
- yapyap 2y ago
  > Kids are getting scheduling via apps now? yeah, they’ve been for a while
- Larrikin 2y ago
  I received a paper planner every school year from elementary school until I went to college. In elementary school the teacher would stand over us while we wrote in it. I constantly would forget it at school. It would get lost at home. If the teacher wasn't reminding us about long running projects from weeks ago it would just be forgotten since I wasn't looking that far back. Then I got to college and someone showed me that they put their assignments in their Google calendar and told me I could set up alerts in my email and later my phone. There were never any forgotten assignments ever again. Paper planners are provably worthless to me.
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  Scheduling, and homework assignments, and textbooks [0], and handing in homework, and communicating absences, and asking the teacher a question later in the day in a groupchat, and the teacher sending an extra thing for everyone to read outside of class even just out of general interest, and communicating with peers about something in another class groupchat where the teacher isn't present, and... Some kids have zero interaction with pen and paper for at least some homeworks, where they'll receive the assignment in a class group, do it on the tablet, send it back there as a PDF, and get back an annotated PDF with the corrections. Not all schools are doing all of that. Some schools are though, and most seem to have implemented some subset. While doing this, the kids are not necessarily taught the basics of what's going on on their devices. They tend to not know the difference between, say: a browser and a search engine; a window and a tab; a menu and a tool bar; an operating system and a desktop environment [1]. Source: students of mine, telling me about their schools and how things work. [0] if there is a textbook. It could just be PDFs of lessons, which could be all from one source or various sources. [1] until I keep pestering them until they start to see a bit clearer, even though we're not doing computer subjects :)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - mlinhares 2y ago
    Isn't it good they don't know these differences? The fact we know is mostly due to poorly designed UX, not some high level concept that needs to be known. Modern phones are a much better UX for most people.
    - sourcepluck 2y ago
      No, I think it's debilitating, disempowering, wholly unnecessary, and that it would be easily solvable if there existed a will to solve it. It's a cultural issue, not a technical one, I mean. I didn't mean in the first message simply knowing the difference between tabs and windows and a few other GUI bits and bobs, those were meant to be an example of a larger point. The larger point being the notion that it's fun and possible to be a combative, pro-active, "liberated" computer user. The empowerment of computer users is diametrically opposed however to the interests of Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, Amazon, etc etc. The ideal computer user for them is one who knows nothing, except exactly what they need to know to keep clicking, commenting, sharing, liking, spewing out their personal details, and fishing out the credit and debit cards.
- paranoidrobot 2y ago
  > It's a neat project though. I wasn't aware Soldered existed so this is a nice find. Quite neat, indeed. I was thinking this would make a good display for Home Assistant, and what do you know, someone has built a HA integration for it[1]. This lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole - it's using a "screensaver" set up for the Kindle[2], which also lead me into the info about jailbreaking Kindles. This adds some projects for over the coming break. [1] https://github.com/lanrat/homeplate https://github.com/lanrat/homeplate [2] https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver
- zellyn 2y ago
  At my high school in South Africa, in the late 80s/early 90s, we had a two-week schedule, so you had to remember not only which day it was, but whether it was week one or week two!
  - Moru 2y ago
    In same timeframe in Sweden we had one schedule with eight different classes every day except the few days when we had a lesson that was two "blocks" long. Everything was in 40 min blocks with a clear pattern of breaks between. We got to copy that down each year by hand on graph paper making the lines and everything. This lead to us mostly knowing our schedules by the second week and hardly having to look at it. Fast forward a few years and my daughter has 2 different lessons per day, it's communicated with an app and she has to look at it at least twice a week after half a year to figure what day what was. The best thing ever to only have two subjects per day so you can actually concentrate on the subjects and not try and fail at multitasking the whole time...
- space_oddity 2y ago
  The project itself is super cool. It's a modern take on managing schedules, but it feels more deliberate than just another app notification
- maccard 2y ago
  > the best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it A sentiment I’ve heard a lot is “how will kids learn the value of money in a cashless society”. The answer, like with the paper planner is “unfortunately the world has changed”. Using a paper calendar or cash isn’t obsolete, but the real trick is learning to schedule/work with money. And in the modern day, you _must_ be able to do this digitally. All my biggest incomes and expenses are digital transactions - my salary, mortgage, insurance, energy bills. Learning to manage cash flow means understanding it in that context. Scheduling is the same now. If you operate solely on a paper planner in thr modern world you’re going to miss out. My workplace is entirely digital, my golf course, gym, even my barber use digital calendars. I’m not saying a proprietary app is the right move, but a paper scheduler is unfortunately bordering on obsolete.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    Even if the money is in flying 747s (it isn't), learning to fly a Cessna at a younger age is still beneficial. Same with cash money and young children. For what it's worth, I've been in the software field for decades - long enough that I prefer not to use it. My preferred barber loses my business because he only accepts appointments via his app. I'm not installing it, so I cut my hair somewhere else. He knows this, and he's busy enough that the loss of a single old customer isn't compelling enough to get him to waste his time scheduling appointments by phone.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Is cash the only thing that gives that benefit? Or was cash just a convenient low-risk mechanism because the pocket money parents give to their kids is in small enough units that they can afford for their kids to waste it or straight up lose it? If the latter, I suspect even games with internal currencies would provide the same learning opportunities. And I don't mean micro-transactions here, I mean like the SimCity (2000 in particular) or Civilization games where your actions within the game are what makes or consumes the currency. But it could also be, say, €$£5/week of vouchers for Steam or Amazon or whatever. (I'm like you when it comes to having been in software too long, and therefore not wanting to install apps for everything).
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Yup, however at the same time there's been an effort to give kids paper planners again as well. Of course, that's been completely ineffective as they still had the apps, all results are published there, and more importantly, last minute schedule updates are still in there too. The school frequently cancels lessons due to teacher shortages; I think they should offer alternatives then, at the very least so that the school days are the same every day. Having to check the night before or even right before leaving if there's any changes is a headache.
  - jhrmnn 2y ago
    When I was in high school 20 years ago, the school published a big sheet of paper on the central notice board, updated each day. Heading there first thing in the morning and seeing whether some of your classes got cancelled was a nice social ritual.
- arrowsmith 2y ago
  I'm also confused by this: "our family’s morning routine [includes] the daily check of the timetable and substitution plan for the kids’ school". I don't get it. Why is he checking his kids' school timetable in the morning? My parents never needed to know my precise timetable for the day. They just dropped me off at school and picked me up again in the morning. Why is this complicated?
slig 2y ago
Thanks for sharing. Just a small nit: the first time you mention the name of the product it's written "Inkscape", not "Inkplate".
Gerard0 2y ago
Nice! Thanks for this. I'll try to replicate it. I'm in the same situation as you and this is what my daughter's school uses. Edit: ahh, I see you are also in Leipzig! :)
kleiba 2y ago
This is cool, but on a second thought it's sad that someone had to jump through so many hoops -- not just to get his idea implemented because of lacking APIs etc., but that the school provides such a crappy service in the first place. But then you realize that we're talking about Germany here, and before you downvote, trust me, anyone who has lived there for a while and especially if they had to deal with public administration will attest that it's a country that's literally 10 to 20 years behind in everything digital. You wouldn't expect it given Germany's engineering reputation, but improving citizen's lives through IT has never been their forte. When we lived there for some years, the school my kids went to had four(!) different parallel channels of communication in the class that one of my kids attended at the time. That is, you could potentially receive a message, say, from the teacher through one of four different means, and so you were expected to monitor these channels every day. Some of them were apps, some of them were paper. It was a mess. Simply doing nothing digitally and only using paper slips would have been an improvement already.
- BoxOfRain 2y ago
  When I lived in Wales a German friend of mine shocked me by complimenting what was then Arriva Wales's railway services. The Cambrian Line was and presumably still is notoriously under-served with small, old trains that are ruinously expensive and constantly delayed/cancelled (common story in the UK). I always assumed German trains would be pretty good but apparently not.
leetrout 2y ago
From the sample code... I would recommend $PASSWD not $PWD for the placeholder to reduce confusion with the linux / osx env var $PWD which is the current directory.
G_o_D 2y ago
Parents are now forced to give their child phones from young age and once child gets phone and internet, we all know what content they would be going to search for, no matter what parenteral controls we keep they will find a way , thats when childs degradation of brain and life starts
small_scombrus 2y ago
> In other words: extracting the information as text and displaying it in a similar way on the e-paper would be … work. So instead let me: 1. take a screenshot of the website 2. Change the styling of the website as the screenshot is being taken 3. Modify the image using headless Inkscape 4. Serve the image on a web-server And I though I liked overcomplicating things while calling it being lazy :D
cududa 2y ago
> The problem is that my son’s mobile phone is governed by strict parental controls, making this daily lookup an unpopular chore on my side This was a neat project, but I feel like this is insanely overkill for a solution that is “whitelist the app required for school”. I sort of feel bad for this kid. I mean, I graduated high school in 15+ years ago and we had a website that we had to regularly check for assignments and project updates and things. It was a requirement of school. I know these types of sites are even more integral process wise, now a days. Having a parent that’s such an engineer, that they impose such odd restrictions on phone use (even for a school site), sounds not fun.
- dagss 2y ago
  I say, kudos to the parent for being restrictive about phone use. At least they are aware of the problem and doing something -- debating the exact technical limits imposed is just nitpicking. But not doing anything is irresponsible. Do you yourself have or teach teenage kids these days? It's a bit like all kids are brought up on heroine -- everyone addicted to doomscrolling/TikTok, teachers spend all their time trying to get attention. Phones and social media have quite drastically altered the reality the kids grow up in in a quite unhealthy way. It's dystopic IMO. Most of us on HN can be grateful for having been able to fully develop our faculties in an age where instant dopamine shots weren't available 24/7.
- mfld 2y ago
  I agree that it seems harsh. However, I have tried the "whitelist this app" route. Turns out that, at least for me, the parental control on android is not sufficient. For example, you cannot block the app store, and in the app store you can watch video previews of games. Also, you get to watch animated gifs on every text field.
- bityard 2y ago
  It sounds like you don't have a kid who is literally incapable of self-moderating their interaction with a screen. I'm not who you are quoting, but we do. We've given him instructions, consequences, rules, expectations, strategies, time-boxing, support, and therapy. He still CANNOT have free access to an internet-connected screen or he will end up on some video site and doom-scroll tiktok videos and the like to the exclusion of everything else that is going on or what he SHOULD be using the device for. EVERY single time. Even if we tell him he's not allowed on those sites. If we give him even a little bit for a while, he'll throw a violent and long-lasting temper tantrum when we say it's time to be done with them. And again the next time we say no. Those short-form reels/shorts/whatever seem to have all the same properties of narcotics on his brain. The ONLY thing that works is giving him free access only to devices with limited functionality. He can watch DVDs on the TV, he can play Wii, he can play thousands of games on his retro handheld gaming console. He is fine with those things and can easily self-moderate with those. He'll do those for a while and then eventually be done with them and go outside and play, or build something out of lego. That would NEVER happen if he was allowed access to a device that he can doom-scroll on. I think we need to acknowledge that while today's digital consumption experiences are generally unhealthy for nearly everyone, there are some non-neurotypical minds that are absolutely defenseless against it.
kcsaba2 2y ago
Nice project!
globular-toast 2y ago
Is this a common thing? When I was in school the timetable was printed on paper and applied for the whole term. What are these substitutions and changes and why do they happen frequently enough to need daily updates? Does the kid have to memorise this in the morning so he knows why rooms to go to? I don't even think my parents were aware of my school timetable. Why would they be? That was my business. It seems a bit weird to me that parents get involved to such an extent.
- AidenVennis 2y ago
  At least in The Netherlands, about 15 years ago when I was in high school, timetables where set for a whole semester, but absent teachers where quite normal meaning some lessons where canceled. Replacements where not always available and where usually only deployed when it was known a teacher was absent for extended time. As a teen this was great because sometimes you could stay in bed longer, be out earlier and not having to carry the extra books (not sure if that still is a problem now). edit: I just remember we even had call trees to call your classmates in the morning if classes got canceled. This was before the internet, making it not 15 years ago but at least 20, probably more. I'm getting old...
  - globular-toast 2y ago
    I went to school 20+ years ago in a school of 3000+ kids in the UK. There simply never were room changes for us. I don't get why you'd make the kids change rooms. Just set the timetable for the year, now the kids are going to be in those rooms at those times. Simple. Any changes, just make the teachers deal with it. In a system where the children outnumber the teachers ~30:1 and have smaller brains and smaller bodies this seems to make more sense to me. As for cancelled lessons, I wish! That never happened. We had a substitute teacher every time. But the substitute came to the room we were already scheduled to be in. The only reasons I can think for making the kids change is if there's a problem with the room itself or if the teachers are not interchangeable between rooms. But I would have thought teachers would find room changes easier now than back then, if anything (given the use of ubiquitous technology like projectors etc.).
- 2y ago
brna-2 2y ago
Cool tech!
simon_acca 2y ago
Very cool! If someone is looking for something similar with less hassle, let me plug my friend’s product :) https://www.inklay.app/ https://www.inklay.app/ I’ve been using it for the better part of a year now to show the weather, a dashboard and some comics and am very happy with it, it just works and looks great too
- petemir 2y ago
  I know it may be at odds with "less hassle", but any thoughts/plans on making it compatible with Home Assistant? Would be nice to have an option to show an HA dashboard there.
- dtpro20 2y ago
  These are amazingly beautiful. I'd be tempted to buy one if it didn't have the brand logo etched into the wood.
  - criddell 2y ago
    Yeah, that seems like a bad decision to me too.
  - Gerard0 2y ago
    This! Posting so that they might read it and reconsider that choice :)
- scoopr 2y ago
  Hmm, it says > Shipping to Switzerland only which is a shame :/
modernerd 2y ago
A great hack that feels closer to Anjan Katta’s vision for what Daylight could become – that instead of VR or AR or projection, we end up putting high quality “natural” screens on more surfaces. This classroom timetable shows the utility of that, and it’s not so hard to imagine it extending to other interactive or non-interactive uses (meeting room reservation, digital store pricing, bus timetables, etc.).
- konschubert 2y ago
  That’s basically why I called my company “Invisible Computers”. And it’s no coincidence that the first product is an epaper calendar :D
  - modernerd 2y ago
    Nice work, can see this naturally extending to commercial spaces too (e.g. coffee shop menus).
- dbbk 2y ago
  When my company were doing RTO they had a SaaS platform to book seats, but of course that information was not displayed anywhere so people just sat wherever, making the whole process pointless. This got me curious about small eInk labels that we could set up some API webhook to refresh. Turns out there's not really any out of the box solutions to do this.
dagss 2y ago
Kudos to the parent for setting clear limits to their kids cell phone use. Most of us on HN can be grateful for having been able to fully develop our faculties in an age where instant dopamine shots weren't available 24/7. Looking at kids growing up now and stories from teachers in classrooms it's dystopic IMO. A 1/3 of teachers' time spent battling for attention against TikTok. Teenagers sitting together and not giving each other proper attention because of constant interrupts from Snapchat. No room for boredness-initiated creativity in the lives whatsoever. I don't think Soma from Brave New World was all that far off from what's happening with smartphones. I hope we're at the top of the curve now though, at least in Norway phone use in education and social settings is seen more and more like smoking and more and more parents at least try to delay the introduction of screens for as long as they can. And (some) high schools are finally imposing PROPER bans against smartphones during class (i.e. confiscation rather than "I promise not to use it" which simply doesn't work). It's a hard long battle at this point though; made harder by adult techno-optimists (most of whom I can only assume probably haven't properly seen teenagers these days in action)
- arrowsmith 2y ago
  > Teenagers sitting together and not giving each other proper attention because of constant interrupts from Snapchat. Why are phones allowed in the classroom? When I was in school, if you were caught looking at your phone in class, or if the phone made a noise from your pocket/bag, it would instantly be confiscated - no second chances. If phones are causing problems in school, maybe the school could try establishing some basic standards of behaviour and discipline? How is this difficult?
  - dagss 2y ago
    I would say the exact same thing as you. But, that is Norway for you... I think the issue might be that in Norway the teachers would not be allowed to confiscate the phone; concerns about school being liable if device is damaged etc. This autumn luckily the Norwegian government FINALLY, very long overdue, made it clear phones should not be allowed. In the school where my wife teaches this made a night and day difference as they started requiring the use of a "phone hotel" during class. But in other schools they for some reason do not.
71bw 2y ago
I really get the feeling that all of this exists so that you can excuse yourself out of your son's school life.
- zo1 2y ago
  There a big difference between being an involved and active parent, and what the schools expect, which is for parents to be little secretarial-assistants and pseudo-teachers to make up for the school's lack of planning, lack of engagement with the students and lack of funding.
- criddell 2y ago
  That's not a very charitable take.
IshKebab 2y ago
I've been working on getting a calendar on an Inkplate 10. Great hardware but my god is the Arduino software awful. It doesn't even have incremental builds! A one line change to my code means it completely recompiles a ton of libraries including mbedtls! The edit-compile-run cycle is like 3 minutes. Awful. Arduino code and APIs are also really badly designed, and badly documented. The Inkplate uses an Xtensa ESP32 so the network code uses this crap: https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/blob/2.0.17/libraries/WiFiClientSecure/src/WiFiClientSecure.h https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/blob/2.0.17/libra... Does `int read();` block? Zero comments so you'll have to read the code, which by the way is very hard to find because of course intellisense doesn't work in the gimped VSCode that Arduino is calling their IDE (it's better than the old one at least, though it wouldn't take much). The really frustrating thing is that Arduino has basically zero competition. I was hopeful for Mbed Studio for a while but they spent so long fucking it up with web based compilers, terrible home-brewed build systems (yotta? I think they went through several bad attempts), before finally doing the right thing (Mbed Studio) that I think everyone had given up waiting and they killed the whole project. Also it's obviously ARM only. And I can't see that really changing. I think there's PlatformIO but I think that just wraps the Arduino code in less awfulness. As long as hardware manufacturers are writing their drivers and examples for Arduino it's going to be hard for anyone else to compete. Ok I think my one-line change has finished compiling now... /rant
- sokoloff 2y ago
  I think the beauty and genius of Arduino was how much more accessible that project made microcontroller development for great many people. As a pro-SWE and dabbling electronics person, I had bounced off the PIC and other toolchains, sometimes managing to get a simple 8051 project working. Then Arduino came along and it was like a light switch was turned on. (Witness how many professional AVR programmers were up in arms over the vast eternal September that suddenly flooded the area. :D ) The IDE tooling is terrible/frustrating for pros in many ways, but "it just works" in some other very important ways. You can get to hello-world (blink an LED) in under 5 minutes. That's huge and appears to be more of what Arduino is targeting.
  - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
adolph 2y ago
What is a word for this type of product? My spouse recently expressed an interest in "Skylight" and this has brought me down a rabbithole of displays for family coordination systems: * Skylight: https://www.skylightframe.com * Hearth: https://hearthdisplay.com * Cozyla: https://www.cozyla.com/ * DAK Board: https://dakboard.com * MagicMirror: https://magicmirror.builders/ * Mango Display: https://mangodisplay.com/ * Echo Show 21: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDWWS127 The concept would be to eliminate leaks from the online calendars stemming from having to rewrite stuff onto the wall calendar.

221 points by mfld 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Kids are getting scheduling via apps now? The best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it. I've finally reached that "back in my day" age. It's a neat project though. I wasn't aware Soldered existed so this is a nice find.

mfld 2y ago
They still have a paper planner. :) But checking the app each morning is mandatory. And in my son's case, there are changes every couple of days.
- didntcheck 2y ago
  This is a nice project, but personally I'd favor demanding that the school come up with an alternate solution for your son that doesn't require you to supply smartphone. Rather than allowing them to shift the burden to you
- al_borland 2y ago
  Why would there be so many changes? Do they seem legitimate, or more like they are trying to justify spending money on the scheduling system and playing with the new toy?
  - mfld 2y ago
    It is more related to sick leave and general scarcity of teachers. I guess before the existence of timetable apps they were better in finding creative ways around those changes.
    - nemomarx 2y ago
      In my experience, teacher absences just meant substitutes, another teacher swapping over / handling two classes, or an impromptu class period spent watching something on tv. I'm not sure that was much better than just telling the students in advance when you know a schedule will change and sending them to the library to study or etc.
- crtasm 2y ago
  The app or the website, right? If this is your blog please add "Show HN: " to the title here.
  - mfld 2y ago
    Correct. And thanks for the remark.
  - beala 2y ago
    I don't think there is a rule that your own work must be tagged with Show HN. You can opt-in to Show HN if > you've made something that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. [1] but afaik nothing in the guidelines [2] requires it. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - crtasm 2y ago
      I see - thankyou
- dragonsky67 2y ago
  It's no wonder that kids are so stressed/anxious these days, seems not even their school classes are certain.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Looks like a very chaotic school.
jeroenhd 2y ago
This is hardly new. My high school did this over fifteen years ago. This app just shows hour+subject+teacher+room number. Quite useful on days the hours/rooms get switched around because a teacher is on leave. Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance). It's hardly comparable. As for this project, I'm not sure how wise it is to build something that relies on scraping some unknown third party website when it comes to school schedules. I'd risk it for my own schedule, but if your scraper makes a mistake you'll get your kid in trouble. Maybe the teacher will believe "it's because my parents made this scheduling contraption" as an excuse, but they'll only accept it once or twice if they do. If there's any app I'd completely unlock in parental controls, it's this one, because it only seems to do the bare minimum anyway.
- mfld 2y ago
  Good points. However unlocking the phone in the morning puts my son on the wrong track: you would be surprised how much time one can spend checking animated gifs by using any text field that will inevitably be unlocked as well. Of course I will take full responsibility in case of bugs... So far it didn't happen.
  - TRiG_Ireland 2y ago
    It's not just kids. It would put me on the wrong track too.
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    I applaud your efforts to keep your son from being addicted to screens. While I'd be more conservative in the setup (I'd probably go with a device without inputs that turns on just to browse to a website directly, making any browsing mistakes or changed layouts less impactful), I do wish there were better alternatives for parents than "hand your kid a smartphone". In an ideal world, schools would use some kind of one-way messaging devices to get the benefits of modern technology without the addiction smartphones bring, but I don't think we'll see that any time soon. Perhaps something like a (locked-down) Remarkable e-Ink tablet with a cellular network connection to receive school notifications and schedule updates as well as for doing homework in could prove quite useful, but that also sounds way too expensive for schools at the moment and you'd need to lock it down so that it's no more distracting than a piece of paper.
whimsicalism 2y ago
i don't think there is much value in teaching a paper planner
- II2II 2y ago
  With many schools banning mobile phones, and similar communications devices, there aren't many alternatives to paper. Also, my elementary school uses paper planners. Given that most elementary schools forbid students from carrying electronics (for no other reason than loss and damage), there isn't much of a choice except paper planners.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    sure as long as you are allowed to use your own notebook for planning and not graded based on formatting in a certain way
JoshTriplett 2y ago
> The best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it. While in general I'm a fan of "learn how to do things by hand for didactic value" (e.g. learning how to do long division before using the calculator to do it), I don't think a paper planner provides any didactic value to learn before replacing it with an electronic calendaring tool.
yapyap 2y ago
> Kids are getting scheduling via apps now? yeah, they’ve been for a while
Larrikin 2y ago
I received a paper planner every school year from elementary school until I went to college. In elementary school the teacher would stand over us while we wrote in it. I constantly would forget it at school. It would get lost at home. If the teacher wasn't reminding us about long running projects from weeks ago it would just be forgotten since I wasn't looking that far back. Then I got to college and someone showed me that they put their assignments in their Google calendar and told me I could set up alerts in my email and later my phone. There were never any forgotten assignments ever again. Paper planners are provably worthless to me.
sourcepluck 2y ago
Scheduling, and homework assignments, and textbooks [0], and handing in homework, and communicating absences, and asking the teacher a question later in the day in a groupchat, and the teacher sending an extra thing for everyone to read outside of class even just out of general interest, and communicating with peers about something in another class groupchat where the teacher isn't present, and... Some kids have zero interaction with pen and paper for at least some homeworks, where they'll receive the assignment in a class group, do it on the tablet, send it back there as a PDF, and get back an annotated PDF with the corrections. Not all schools are doing all of that. Some schools are though, and most seem to have implemented some subset. While doing this, the kids are not necessarily taught the basics of what's going on on their devices. They tend to not know the difference between, say: a browser and a search engine; a window and a tab; a menu and a tool bar; an operating system and a desktop environment [1]. Source: students of mine, telling me about their schools and how things work. [0] if there is a textbook. It could just be PDFs of lessons, which could be all from one source or various sources. [1] until I keep pestering them until they start to see a bit clearer, even though we're not doing computer subjects :)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mlinhares 2y ago
  Isn't it good they don't know these differences? The fact we know is mostly due to poorly designed UX, not some high level concept that needs to be known. Modern phones are a much better UX for most people.
  - sourcepluck 2y ago
    No, I think it's debilitating, disempowering, wholly unnecessary, and that it would be easily solvable if there existed a will to solve it. It's a cultural issue, not a technical one, I mean. I didn't mean in the first message simply knowing the difference between tabs and windows and a few other GUI bits and bobs, those were meant to be an example of a larger point. The larger point being the notion that it's fun and possible to be a combative, pro-active, "liberated" computer user. The empowerment of computer users is diametrically opposed however to the interests of Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, Amazon, etc etc. The ideal computer user for them is one who knows nothing, except exactly what they need to know to keep clicking, commenting, sharing, liking, spewing out their personal details, and fishing out the credit and debit cards.
paranoidrobot 2y ago
> It's a neat project though. I wasn't aware Soldered existed so this is a nice find. Quite neat, indeed. I was thinking this would make a good display for Home Assistant, and what do you know, someone has built a HA integration for it[1]. This lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole - it's using a "screensaver" set up for the Kindle[2], which also lead me into the info about jailbreaking Kindles. This adds some projects for over the coming break. [1] https://github.com/lanrat/homeplate https://github.com/lanrat/homeplate [2] https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver
zellyn 2y ago
At my high school in South Africa, in the late 80s/early 90s, we had a two-week schedule, so you had to remember not only which day it was, but whether it was week one or week two!
- Moru 2y ago
  In same timeframe in Sweden we had one schedule with eight different classes every day except the few days when we had a lesson that was two "blocks" long. Everything was in 40 min blocks with a clear pattern of breaks between. We got to copy that down each year by hand on graph paper making the lines and everything. This lead to us mostly knowing our schedules by the second week and hardly having to look at it. Fast forward a few years and my daughter has 2 different lessons per day, it's communicated with an app and she has to look at it at least twice a week after half a year to figure what day what was. The best thing ever to only have two subjects per day so you can actually concentrate on the subjects and not try and fail at multitasking the whole time...
space_oddity 2y ago
The project itself is super cool. It's a modern take on managing schedules, but it feels more deliberate than just another app notification
maccard 2y ago
> the best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it A sentiment I’ve heard a lot is “how will kids learn the value of money in a cashless society”. The answer, like with the paper planner is “unfortunately the world has changed”. Using a paper calendar or cash isn’t obsolete, but the real trick is learning to schedule/work with money. And in the modern day, you _must_ be able to do this digitally. All my biggest incomes and expenses are digital transactions - my salary, mortgage, insurance, energy bills. Learning to manage cash flow means understanding it in that context. Scheduling is the same now. If you operate solely on a paper planner in thr modern world you’re going to miss out. My workplace is entirely digital, my golf course, gym, even my barber use digital calendars. I’m not saying a proprietary app is the right move, but a paper scheduler is unfortunately bordering on obsolete.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Even if the money is in flying 747s (it isn't), learning to fly a Cessna at a younger age is still beneficial. Same with cash money and young children. For what it's worth, I've been in the software field for decades - long enough that I prefer not to use it. My preferred barber loses my business because he only accepts appointments via his app. I'm not installing it, so I cut my hair somewhere else. He knows this, and he's busy enough that the loss of a single old customer isn't compelling enough to get him to waste his time scheduling appointments by phone.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Is cash the only thing that gives that benefit? Or was cash just a convenient low-risk mechanism because the pocket money parents give to their kids is in small enough units that they can afford for their kids to waste it or straight up lose it? If the latter, I suspect even games with internal currencies would provide the same learning opportunities. And I don't mean micro-transactions here, I mean like the SimCity (2000 in particular) or Civilization games where your actions within the game are what makes or consumes the currency. But it could also be, say, €$£5/week of vouchers for Steam or Amazon or whatever. (I'm like you when it comes to having been in software too long, and therefore not wanting to install apps for everything).
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Yup, however at the same time there's been an effort to give kids paper planners again as well. Of course, that's been completely ineffective as they still had the apps, all results are published there, and more importantly, last minute schedule updates are still in there too. The school frequently cancels lessons due to teacher shortages; I think they should offer alternatives then, at the very least so that the school days are the same every day. Having to check the night before or even right before leaving if there's any changes is a headache.
- jhrmnn 2y ago
  When I was in high school 20 years ago, the school published a big sheet of paper on the central notice board, updated each day. Heading there first thing in the morning and seeing whether some of your classes got cancelled was a nice social ritual.
arrowsmith 2y ago
I'm also confused by this: "our family’s morning routine [includes] the daily check of the timetable and substitution plan for the kids’ school". I don't get it. Why is he checking his kids' school timetable in the morning? My parents never needed to know my precise timetable for the day. They just dropped me off at school and picked me up again in the morning. Why is this complicated?

slig 2y ago

Thanks for sharing. Just a small nit: the first time you mention the name of the product it's written "Inkscape", not "Inkplate".

Gerard0 2y ago

Nice! Thanks for this. I'll try to replicate it. I'm in the same situation as you and this is what my daughter's school uses. Edit: ahh, I see you are also in Leipzig! :)

kleiba 2y ago

This is cool, but on a second thought it's sad that someone had to jump through so many hoops -- not just to get his idea implemented because of lacking APIs etc., but that the school provides such a crappy service in the first place. But then you realize that we're talking about Germany here, and before you downvote, trust me, anyone who has lived there for a while and especially if they had to deal with public administration will attest that it's a country that's literally 10 to 20 years behind in everything digital. You wouldn't expect it given Germany's engineering reputation, but improving citizen's lives through IT has never been their forte. When we lived there for some years, the school my kids went to had four(!) different parallel channels of communication in the class that one of my kids attended at the time. That is, you could potentially receive a message, say, from the teacher through one of four different means, and so you were expected to monitor these channels every day. Some of them were apps, some of them were paper. It was a mess. Simply doing nothing digitally and only using paper slips would have been an improvement already.

BoxOfRain 2y ago
When I lived in Wales a German friend of mine shocked me by complimenting what was then Arriva Wales's railway services. The Cambrian Line was and presumably still is notoriously under-served with small, old trains that are ruinously expensive and constantly delayed/cancelled (common story in the UK). I always assumed German trains would be pretty good but apparently not.

leetrout 2y ago

From the sample code... I would recommend $PASSWD not $PWD for the placeholder to reduce confusion with the linux / osx env var $PWD which is the current directory.

G_o_D 2y ago

Parents are now forced to give their child phones from young age and once child gets phone and internet, we all know what content they would be going to search for, no matter what parenteral controls we keep they will find a way , thats when childs degradation of brain and life starts

small_scombrus 2y ago

> In other words: extracting the information as text and displaying it in a similar way on the e-paper would be … work. So instead let me: 1. take a screenshot of the website 2. Change the styling of the website as the screenshot is being taken 3. Modify the image using headless Inkscape 4. Serve the image on a web-server And I though I liked overcomplicating things while calling it being lazy :D

cududa 2y ago

> The problem is that my son’s mobile phone is governed by strict parental controls, making this daily lookup an unpopular chore on my side This was a neat project, but I feel like this is insanely overkill for a solution that is “whitelist the app required for school”. I sort of feel bad for this kid. I mean, I graduated high school in 15+ years ago and we had a website that we had to regularly check for assignments and project updates and things. It was a requirement of school. I know these types of sites are even more integral process wise, now a days. Having a parent that’s such an engineer, that they impose such odd restrictions on phone use (even for a school site), sounds not fun.

dagss 2y ago
I say, kudos to the parent for being restrictive about phone use. At least they are aware of the problem and doing something -- debating the exact technical limits imposed is just nitpicking. But not doing anything is irresponsible. Do you yourself have or teach teenage kids these days? It's a bit like all kids are brought up on heroine -- everyone addicted to doomscrolling/TikTok, teachers spend all their time trying to get attention. Phones and social media have quite drastically altered the reality the kids grow up in in a quite unhealthy way. It's dystopic IMO. Most of us on HN can be grateful for having been able to fully develop our faculties in an age where instant dopamine shots weren't available 24/7.
mfld 2y ago
I agree that it seems harsh. However, I have tried the "whitelist this app" route. Turns out that, at least for me, the parental control on android is not sufficient. For example, you cannot block the app store, and in the app store you can watch video previews of games. Also, you get to watch animated gifs on every text field.
bityard 2y ago
It sounds like you don't have a kid who is literally incapable of self-moderating their interaction with a screen. I'm not who you are quoting, but we do. We've given him instructions, consequences, rules, expectations, strategies, time-boxing, support, and therapy. He still CANNOT have free access to an internet-connected screen or he will end up on some video site and doom-scroll tiktok videos and the like to the exclusion of everything else that is going on or what he SHOULD be using the device for. EVERY single time. Even if we tell him he's not allowed on those sites. If we give him even a little bit for a while, he'll throw a violent and long-lasting temper tantrum when we say it's time to be done with them. And again the next time we say no. Those short-form reels/shorts/whatever seem to have all the same properties of narcotics on his brain. The ONLY thing that works is giving him free access only to devices with limited functionality. He can watch DVDs on the TV, he can play Wii, he can play thousands of games on his retro handheld gaming console. He is fine with those things and can easily self-moderate with those. He'll do those for a while and then eventually be done with them and go outside and play, or build something out of lego. That would NEVER happen if he was allowed access to a device that he can doom-scroll on. I think we need to acknowledge that while today's digital consumption experiences are generally unhealthy for nearly everyone, there are some non-neurotypical minds that are absolutely defenseless against it.

kcsaba2 2y ago

Nice project!

globular-toast 2y ago

Is this a common thing? When I was in school the timetable was printed on paper and applied for the whole term. What are these substitutions and changes and why do they happen frequently enough to need daily updates? Does the kid have to memorise this in the morning so he knows why rooms to go to? I don't even think my parents were aware of my school timetable. Why would they be? That was my business. It seems a bit weird to me that parents get involved to such an extent.

AidenVennis 2y ago
At least in The Netherlands, about 15 years ago when I was in high school, timetables where set for a whole semester, but absent teachers where quite normal meaning some lessons where canceled. Replacements where not always available and where usually only deployed when it was known a teacher was absent for extended time. As a teen this was great because sometimes you could stay in bed longer, be out earlier and not having to carry the extra books (not sure if that still is a problem now). edit: I just remember we even had call trees to call your classmates in the morning if classes got canceled. This was before the internet, making it not 15 years ago but at least 20, probably more. I'm getting old...
- globular-toast 2y ago
  I went to school 20+ years ago in a school of 3000+ kids in the UK. There simply never were room changes for us. I don't get why you'd make the kids change rooms. Just set the timetable for the year, now the kids are going to be in those rooms at those times. Simple. Any changes, just make the teachers deal with it. In a system where the children outnumber the teachers ~30:1 and have smaller brains and smaller bodies this seems to make more sense to me. As for cancelled lessons, I wish! That never happened. We had a substitute teacher every time. But the substitute came to the room we were already scheduled to be in. The only reasons I can think for making the kids change is if there's a problem with the room itself or if the teachers are not interchangeable between rooms. But I would have thought teachers would find room changes easier now than back then, if anything (given the use of ubiquitous technology like projectors etc.).
2y ago

brna-2 2y ago

Cool tech!

simon_acca 2y ago

Very cool! If someone is looking for something similar with less hassle, let me plug my friend’s product :) https://www.inklay.app/ https://www.inklay.app/ I’ve been using it for the better part of a year now to show the weather, a dashboard and some comics and am very happy with it, it just works and looks great too

petemir 2y ago
I know it may be at odds with "less hassle", but any thoughts/plans on making it compatible with Home Assistant? Would be nice to have an option to show an HA dashboard there.
dtpro20 2y ago
These are amazingly beautiful. I'd be tempted to buy one if it didn't have the brand logo etched into the wood.
- criddell 2y ago
  Yeah, that seems like a bad decision to me too.
- Gerard0 2y ago
  This! Posting so that they might read it and reconsider that choice :)
scoopr 2y ago
Hmm, it says > Shipping to Switzerland only which is a shame :/

modernerd 2y ago

A great hack that feels closer to Anjan Katta’s vision for what Daylight could become – that instead of VR or AR or projection, we end up putting high quality “natural” screens on more surfaces. This classroom timetable shows the utility of that, and it’s not so hard to imagine it extending to other interactive or non-interactive uses (meeting room reservation, digital store pricing, bus timetables, etc.).

konschubert 2y ago
That’s basically why I called my company “Invisible Computers”. And it’s no coincidence that the first product is an epaper calendar :D
- modernerd 2y ago
  Nice work, can see this naturally extending to commercial spaces too (e.g. coffee shop menus).
dbbk 2y ago
When my company were doing RTO they had a SaaS platform to book seats, but of course that information was not displayed anywhere so people just sat wherever, making the whole process pointless. This got me curious about small eInk labels that we could set up some API webhook to refresh. Turns out there's not really any out of the box solutions to do this.

dagss 2y ago

Kudos to the parent for setting clear limits to their kids cell phone use. Most of us on HN can be grateful for having been able to fully develop our faculties in an age where instant dopamine shots weren't available 24/7. Looking at kids growing up now and stories from teachers in classrooms it's dystopic IMO. A 1/3 of teachers' time spent battling for attention against TikTok. Teenagers sitting together and not giving each other proper attention because of constant interrupts from Snapchat. No room for boredness-initiated creativity in the lives whatsoever. I don't think Soma from Brave New World was all that far off from what's happening with smartphones. I hope we're at the top of the curve now though, at least in Norway phone use in education and social settings is seen more and more like smoking and more and more parents at least try to delay the introduction of screens for as long as they can. And (some) high schools are finally imposing PROPER bans against smartphones during class (i.e. confiscation rather than "I promise not to use it" which simply doesn't work). It's a hard long battle at this point though; made harder by adult techno-optimists (most of whom I can only assume probably haven't properly seen teenagers these days in action)

arrowsmith 2y ago
> Teenagers sitting together and not giving each other proper attention because of constant interrupts from Snapchat. Why are phones allowed in the classroom? When I was in school, if you were caught looking at your phone in class, or if the phone made a noise from your pocket/bag, it would instantly be confiscated - no second chances. If phones are causing problems in school, maybe the school could try establishing some basic standards of behaviour and discipline? How is this difficult?
- dagss 2y ago
  I would say the exact same thing as you. But, that is Norway for you... I think the issue might be that in Norway the teachers would not be allowed to confiscate the phone; concerns about school being liable if device is damaged etc. This autumn luckily the Norwegian government FINALLY, very long overdue, made it clear phones should not be allowed. In the school where my wife teaches this made a night and day difference as they started requiring the use of a "phone hotel" during class. But in other schools they for some reason do not.

71bw 2y ago

I really get the feeling that all of this exists so that you can excuse yourself out of your son's school life.

zo1 2y ago
There a big difference between being an involved and active parent, and what the schools expect, which is for parents to be little secretarial-assistants and pseudo-teachers to make up for the school's lack of planning, lack of engagement with the students and lack of funding.
criddell 2y ago
That's not a very charitable take.

IshKebab 2y ago

I've been working on getting a calendar on an Inkplate 10. Great hardware but my god is the Arduino software awful. It doesn't even have incremental builds! A one line change to my code means it completely recompiles a ton of libraries including mbedtls! The edit-compile-run cycle is like 3 minutes. Awful. Arduino code and APIs are also really badly designed, and badly documented. The Inkplate uses an Xtensa ESP32 so the network code uses this crap: https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/blob/2.0.17/libraries/WiFiClientSecure/src/WiFiClientSecure.h https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/blob/2.0.17/libra... Does `int read();` block? Zero comments so you'll have to read the code, which by the way is very hard to find because of course intellisense doesn't work in the gimped VSCode that Arduino is calling their IDE (it's better than the old one at least, though it wouldn't take much). The really frustrating thing is that Arduino has basically zero competition. I was hopeful for Mbed Studio for a while but they spent so long fucking it up with web based compilers, terrible home-brewed build systems (yotta? I think they went through several bad attempts), before finally doing the right thing (Mbed Studio) that I think everyone had given up waiting and they killed the whole project. Also it's obviously ARM only. And I can't see that really changing. I think there's PlatformIO but I think that just wraps the Arduino code in less awfulness. As long as hardware manufacturers are writing their drivers and examples for Arduino it's going to be hard for anyone else to compete. Ok I think my one-line change has finished compiling now... /rant

sokoloff 2y ago
I think the beauty and genius of Arduino was how much more accessible that project made microcontroller development for great many people. As a pro-SWE and dabbling electronics person, I had bounced off the PIC and other toolchains, sometimes managing to get a simple 8051 project working. Then Arduino came along and it was like a light switch was turned on. (Witness how many professional AVR programmers were up in arms over the vast eternal September that suddenly flooded the area. :D ) The IDE tooling is terrible/frustrating for pros in many ways, but "it just works" in some other very important ways. You can get to hello-world (blink an LED) in under 5 minutes. That's huge and appears to be more of what Arduino is targeting.
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adolph 2y ago

What is a word for this type of product? My spouse recently expressed an interest in "Skylight" and this has brought me down a rabbithole of displays for family coordination systems: * Skylight: https://www.skylightframe.com * Hearth: https://hearthdisplay.com * Cozyla: https://www.cozyla.com/ * DAK Board: https://dakboard.com * MagicMirror: https://magicmirror.builders/ * Mango Display: https://mangodisplay.com/ * Echo Show 21: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDWWS127 The concept would be to eliminate leaks from the online calendars stemming from having to rewrite stuff onto the wall calendar.