Fellow Nerves enthusiast here. Having an easy-to-use (YMMV) eInk display library in Elixir makes a whole slew of useful lab/tinker equipment feasible! Shoutout to @lawik for taking the effort to port inky over. It's fairly tedious to work with all the SPI and image buffer tweaks.

eInk's have nice readability for "around the lab" type equipment. Having a nice Nerves compatible wrapper lowers that barrier of entry even more. Sure you can do it with Python and a RPi Zero and perhaps some Ansible scripts or PiBakery, but there's something great about being able to make a custom (e.g. < 50 MB) embedded Linux sd-card image with proper SSH network/credentialing, all in around as long as it takes to download a full Raspbian distro on a busy network... I am planning on building a custom weighing station for simple chemical titration next week and have a nice unused eInk display sitting around.