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This is super cool, and I wish something like this existed at my place, as it enables information sharing without the need for phones/actual screens that shine
by NikxDa 7mo ago
This is super cool, and I wish something like this existed at my place, as it enables information sharing without the need for phones/actual screens that shine in your face when the lights are low or tempt you to doomscroll.
That said, the large primary display this uses is $2000. That's very hard to justify for any "normal" household, and that's without any mounts, backend, services etc.
- lakid 7mo agoYou can make smaller ones for much much less. I’ll post pics of mine a bit later but waveshare 7.5” display in a photo frame and almost any ESP32 dev board and you are set for less than $100 (along with suitable HomeAssistant and ESPhome infrastructure to support it). The original article is a very slick bit of work, so well done
- fenykep 7mo agoThe article also mentions using jailbroken kindles which I assume should be the cheapest way to get a decent sized epaper screen with builtin connectivity. edit: https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver
- scary-size 7mo agoYep, it’s super cheap. I wrote about mine here:: https://franz.hamburg/writing/kindling-e-ink-dashboard.html https://franz.hamburg/writing/kindling-e-ink-dashboard.html
- Jyaif 7mo agoYou can also buy some for less than $100. I can vouch for the reTerminal: the build quality is excellent, and they come with a battery, sd card reader, and some sensors: https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-E1001-p-6534.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-E1001-p-6534.html
- boneitis 7mo agoGonna piggyback here to second this and chime in to say I went with the BYOD screen linked within your link for $49 (SKU 104991005). It's definitely more barebones and probably not even as cost-effective if you're still planning on buying the "lifetime" TRMNL API access. I don't have easy access to a 3d printer, so I just have mine sitting on an extra phone stand I had lying around that can be had for a few bucks from Amazon. I couldn't be happier with it and am thoroughly enjoying my complacent, lazy solution :)
- IanCal 7mo agoFWIW you need to pay for the trmnl key ($50) to use your own device with their servers, but if you run a server yourself you don’t need to pay. I’m very tempted, a lot lower resolution than a kindle but it’d be pretty cool.
- boneitis 7mo agoi could have been clearer about that. but yeah, even for what i paid, i was happy to immediately be off to the races designing the couple panels within their web portal and having something functional and useful to me without any real friction from having to figure things out. moving on to the self-hosting side is probably now backburnered indefinitely, even if i do have some grander ideas in the longer term. unfortunately, i'd need more than a weekend project's timeframe to bring them to fruition.
- ryanckulp 7mo agoyou can point a higher def Kindle to TMRNL, either our closed source web app or free to an open source server. https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-kindle https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-kindle https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-koreader https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-koreader
- tootie 7mo agoI have a similar setup at home with a homemade dashboard. It's less polished and I've never implemented smart home (don't use any smart home devices) but it's calendar, weather, air quality and subway alerts. I also took the tack of building the UI with Bootstrap 3 so that it will run on any of my ancient devices like a gen 2 ipad air. I did it as much to usefully recycle old screens as anything else.
- bluGill 7mo agoHome assistant is great even if you don't have devices. It can get data from all you calendars weather and such.
- ryanckulp 7mo agoOP's Timeframe looks rad, but yes on the pricy side. check out trmnl .com for smaller / less expensive options and self hosted options. (disclaimer: i'm on the team)
- weakfish 7mo agoYo Ryan! I get your emails! I was just reading this thinking “man he should’ve tried TRMNL” I love my original one and am planning to get a model X when budget permits
- hawksley 7mo agoI’m a big fan of TRMNL! The big difference with the Boox device is real-time updates, which make the smart home status information much more useful.
- ryanckulp 7mo agothanks for the support and i hear you. a few folks pointed their Boox at TRMNL[1], and we’re finally in the smart home arena now with free 5 min refresh rate for Home Assistant. aiming for JIT refresh by summer. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/s/ZSLF7u5pm8 https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/s/ZSLF7u5pm8
- woadwarrior01 7mo agolol, €17.95 for a Developer "Unlock"[1]. [1]: https://shop.trmnl.com/products/developer-edition https://shop.trmnl.com/products/developer-edition
- SchemaLoad 7mo agoThat's just a perpetual license to use their hosted server. You are free to use your own self hosted server for free.
- kelipso 7mo agoThey should really clean up the phrasing because it sound so sketch, like they're locking device features for money, turns people off easily.
- rolfus 7mo agoI made this thing [1] for us, it uses a cheap 10" e-paper display off aliexpress, an ESP32 and a couple of I2C sensors. The case is 3D-printed. It runs on two 18650 batteries, and all in all it cost less than 100$. The OpenWeather API is free for personal use. [1] https://mjones-foui.no/img/wall_clock_1.png https://mjones-foui.no/img/wall_clock_1.png
- TurdF3rguson 7mo agoI need to know why the opposite of 'rain' is 'yo'.
- Dban1 7mo agoyo it's time to go out!
- embedding-shape 7mo agoSeems the sun is the one saying "yo", perhaps as a form of a greeting as it was raining the days before? I'm just guessing, but I think it might simply just be for fun :)
- rolfus 7mo agoThe sun is greeting you! I drew these freehand, kind of quickly. And while I personally like the style and think it's a good fit for us, I did intend to make several sets of weather icons. At the very least I need to make the sun symbols adapt to the seasons - we don't really have a full sun during the darkest months of the year where I live.
- deepriverfish 7mo agohi I've been interested in doing something like this for myself, what tools and software did you use?
- golem14 7mo ago+1, and have you tried running 2 displays side by side ? That should give you an effective diagonal of 14 inches or so, and for those displays, cutting it in two does not really affect the utility of the display (likely tabular content anyway). Seems like the author has experimented with 2 kindles side by side.
- ThrowawayR2 7mo agoThere are a couple of options for a large, non-backlit, low power display that are less expensive than the e-ink monitor they're using. One is the Samsung EM32DX, a 32" color e-ink digital sign for <$1300 (<$1000 if you can find it on sale) but it has a long refresh time. The other is the SVD rE 32" reflective LCD monitor for ~$1000, but it needs to be in brightly lit rooms because of its low contrast.
- hawksley 7mo agoIn my post, I talk about how QHD was not high enough resolution for usable text rendering at 32". The SVD monitor is even lower resolution, just 1080p. I'd love to see a true 4k SVD product but I'm guessing it'd be even more expensive than the Mira Pro.
- windexh8er 7mo agoThere are lots of other eInk devices you can use LVGL with. ReTerminal and other derivatives from Seeed Studio are two options. Seeed even has a newish color unitfor under $250 [0]. Not trying to diminish all of the thought and work that's gone into OPs project but a lot of this has been available to do in HomeAssistant for quite some time. Glad more people are finally seeing the value in eInk like this. I've been using them for a while in my office and bedroom for simple status as the OP states: only showing certain status depending on state. The other unit I tinkered with quite a bit of is the Heltec Vision Master E290 [1] which is a 3" eInk devices for under $35. Based on ESP32 and has LoRa. [0] https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-E1004-p-6692.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-E1004-p-6692.html [1] https://heltec.org/project/vision-master-e290/ https://heltec.org/project/vision-master-e290/
- danielheath 7mo agoI did a similar thing with a regular backlit computer screen. It automatically shuts off after 30 seconds of inactivity. I added a $3 webcam, and use openCV to detect motion. If three consecutive frames (sampled 0.5s apart) are each sufficiently difficult from the previous one, it attaches a virtual USB mouse, then moves it one pixel. This wakes up the display whenever you walk past, then puts it back to sleep again when you stop moving. The motion-detection pipeline uses less than 0.3% CPU on an intel N100 (6w TDP).
- jofzar 7mo agoYou can probably just use a cheap motion sensor instead of the webcam if you wanted to. There so many now
- hipjiveguy 7mo agoIf you have some to suggest, I'd love to hear it... TIA!
- dimitri-vs 7mo agoWhat's your budget? https://en.tokyodevices.com/items/128 https://en.tokyodevices.com/items/128 But seriously you can probably DIY something a lot cheaper.
- bayesianbot 7mo agoSomething like LD2410 [0]. IIRC there's newer ones that report accurate position and even heart beat rate, but I've forgotten the names of those.. [0] https://dronebotworkshop.com/ld2410c-human-sensor/ https://dronebotworkshop.com/ld2410c-human-sensor/
- IanCal 7mo agoHere’s one https://thepihut.com/products/60ghz-mmwave-breathing-and-heartbeat-detection-sensor-mr60bha2 https://thepihut.com/products/60ghz-mmwave-breathing-and-hea... Same kind of tech but higher frequency.
- cweagans 7mo agoYou might be interested in knowing about https://trmnl.com https://trmnl.com. No affiliation beyond interest in buying a few in the future. They have a 10.3" version in the works.
- simonmales 7mo agoGood thing about trmnl is you can run the entire backend if the company disappears.
- keyle 7mo agoLooks good, the refresh rate... does not! 200ms for partial refresh, ouch. The ease of integrations might make up for it, though.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- heresie-dabord 7mo agoe-ink is low-power and easy on the eyes. But for a cheaper project recipe: * repurposed old LCD rotated to portrait mode * Raspberry Pi 400 * Debian with Sway showing various tiled terminals/browser windows * self-hosted REST server that collects/provides data to display
- grabshot_dev 7mo agoIf you go the image-rendering route for e-paper, Sharp (the Node.js libvips binding) is surprisingly good for this. You can do grayscale conversion, resize to the exact panel resolution, and apply Floyd-Steinberg dithering all in one pipeline with minimal memory overhead. The trick with e-ink displays is that naive grayscale conversion looks terrible because you lose all mid-tone detail. Dithering the image down to 2-4 levels before sending it to the display makes a huge difference in readability, especially for things like weather icons and charts. ImageMagick can do it too but Sharp is about 4-5x faster for batch processing since it avoids spawning subprocesses.
- silversmith 7mo agoMy solution was to buy a used Samsung tablet with OLED screen, and control the display on with motion sensors. It sits in the hallway, above the keys drawer. The screen is on only when someone's walking nearby, and around eye level when you go pick up the keys. Designed the dashboard based around muted colours on black background, with brights reserved for "hey pay attention to this" data. And most importantly, the screen is not visible from any spot you're likely to stay at for a longer time. As for mounting, I used calipers, 3d printer and some double sided tape. It's not completely seamless, but damn close for ~10% of the effort.
- remlov 7mo agoWould love some details how you enabled controlling the display with motion sensors.
- silversmith 7mo agoThe tablet itself runs https://www.fully-kiosk.com/ https://www.fully-kiosk.com/ to display a web dashboard. Fully Kiosk has good Home Assistant integration, including screen on / off controls. I also have a bunch of Sonoff battry operated zigbee motion sensors scattered around the place. Then Home Assistant does what it was meant to do - act as a glue layer between various systems, firing screen control commands to Fully Kiosk as a result of select motion sensors triggering.
- Sander_Marechal 7mo agoWhat's the software stack? Did you write an app for it? Jailbreak it?
- silversmith 7mo agoNo jailbreak necessary - the tablet runs https://www.fully-kiosk.com/ https://www.fully-kiosk.com/, and displays a web dashboard. The dashboard itself is a react app talking to my Home Assitant instance over a websocket. The heavy lifting of bringing various data sources together is done by HA, I just wrote a react app because it seemed easier than learning to customize HA dashboards to the degree I wanted to.
- neop1x 7mo agoIn Czechia we have LaskaKit which is ESP32-based board with a GoodDisplay e-paper. It works perfectly with ESPHome and Home Assistant. :) https://www.laskakit.cz/en/laskakit-live-7-5-e-paper-stavebnice-s-wifi-pro---zivy-obraz-/ https://www.laskakit.cz/en/laskakit-live-7-5-e-paper-stavebn...
- fragmede 7mo agoApproach the expense like a business. Save up for expense, but more than that, look at lost revenue due to time lost to doom scrolling. If you're able to be more productive or having it results in more productivity, can you said to not get it? That said, $2,000 is for one at that size. You could get a e-reader and root it for way less. It would be smaller but would be correspondingly cheaper.