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Show HN: I made a battery-powered e-ink display that shows my calendar (stavros.io)
68 points by stavros on March 6, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments



Hah I did something similar. Took an old Kindle and jailbroke it. It runs a script that will wake it up and refresh every half hour. It pulls down images of my google calendar from a small app I wrote that runs in my k8s cluster. I use shot-scraper, though. Allows me to inject some JS and CSS to prettify it.

Works well. About 1-2mo of battery life. I 3D printed a frame for it with some magnets so I can affix it to the fridge.


Fantastic, do you have code somewhere? I jailbroke mine, I should definitely do that.


Hey everyone! I got an e-ink display and wanted to make something with it, and made this! I call it the Timeframe, and it was really fun to make. I'll be around to chat if you have any questions.


I was just literally this morning thinking of building this same thing! Very nice work.


Thank you! Now you can build it much more easily!


Love the writeup, and thanks for showing me the LilyGo T5! I've got ideas for things I'd like to make with thatttt

As an aside, the voice reminds me quite a bit of Marvin the Paranoid Android and I kinda love it


What are you going to make?!

> As an aside, the voice reminds me quite a bit of Marvin the Paranoid Android and I kinda love it

Haha, thanks, I was going for existential angst. It's good to see I didn't fail, unlike in everything else.


Very cool, not GP but also thanks for pointing me to this board. I’m just getting into hardware stuff but have an e-ink project in mind.


Excellent, what is it?


Reminds me of the Newton! Great little project and nice idea to just render an image and have it display that, rather than programming all the graphics on the device, well done!


Thanks! I like how flexible that approach is, I can turn it into a weather station just by generating a different image. I really like this display, too, it's very legible and consumes very little battery.


Looks great and somehow it reminds me Hartmut Esslinger's design for Apple from 80s


Oh huh, you're right, it does look very similar:

https://www.designboom.com/technology/hartmut-esslingers-ear...

Must be the matte white plastic, I hadn't seen those, thanks!


Gotta be the plastic indeed; it also reminds me of this [1] - a mockup design I cannot track the source but guess it's also one of Apple. Kinda similar to old iPad docks

[1] - https://ibb.co/qxDVBng


That's a comfortable sightseeing.


How much did it cost you to make?


Hmm, around $60 in materials and $10,000 in time.


Cool, thanks :)




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