$48 e-paper display can be whatever you want it to be | Hacker News Reader

$48 e-paper display can be whatever you want it to be

arstechnica.com

60 pointsevolve2k13 comments

I have a couple of these and they are great. I'm transitioning to BTLE e-ink screens (hand-assembled, I wish there were nice off-the-shelf versions) because of their much lower power draw.

Currently I have a handful of the all-in-on seeed studio reTerminal E1001's that rotate book quotes I've highlighted on my kindle (jailbroken, KOReader+BookOrbit) once a day so they can last months on a battery charge. But with BTLE you can go years on a single charge, update more often, and push to the device to force an update (all things not possible when deep-sleeping wifi for 23.99 hours out of the day).

e-ink displays are so nice and once I get the BTLE+OpenDisplay setup perfected I'll probably grab ~10 more boards/displays for other places around the house.

Could you say a little more about how you plan to use BTLE and which units you’re using? I set one of these up last month and it’s generally great, but yeah wifi is a hog. It never occurred to me that something with BTLE would make such a difference.

It’s a great form factor though, isn’t it? Kicked off a bit of an e-ink / esp32 boom for me. I just bought 4 integrated 4-inch displays to complement this 7.5.

OpenDisplay's calculator is what I'm basing it off: https://opendisplay.org/firmware/battery/index.html

My first EN05 board had a problem with the battery and I just got the replacement a few days ago and haven't had time set it up or do long-term tests. I also was blown away by the WiFi vs BTLE power usage. I love ESP32 but for battery powered I'm looking closer at BTLE. I actually have 3 ESP32's around the house to act as BTLE proxies for Home Assistant which I can use with OpenDisplay as well.

And yes, it's a great form factor, it looks great, and just makes me smile when I walk by one. Once I can solve the "more updates, less recharging" I plan to frame a number of these to hang on the wall.

Thank you, much appreciated :) Just picked up a couple from AliExpress.

I bought a TRMNL (and the upgraded perpetual dev license) about 14 months ago, it's been great, lives next to our coffee machine, I set it up back then and it's been totally maintenance free, besides having to charge it about every 2 months. They're assembled in the guy's dad's barn in the US and extremely developer/tinkerer/diy friendly. Highly recommend. "It Just Works".

Cute but these things are always too small and too slow. Let's have a full page (14 inch) one that can redraw the screen in say 1 second, for e-reading. Being fast enough for video would be great but is not required.

It is actually kinda neat on the surface. What I found more interesting that they immediately tied a whole bunch services around making it more using to anyone other than a hobbyist. Smart.

I wonder if there aren't IKEA frames of appropriate size.

Kudos to Seeed Studio for not tying the hardware to a software ecosystem. That's how it should always be

Just means they don't have to do it, and rely on the community to provide it.

> The Terminus package is a multi-container compose stack with pieces like Sidekiq worker, Postgres, Valkey, and a certificate initializer.

Jesus Overcomplicating Christ. I have a similar device that I built (ESP32 + eInk display) and the server is a single python script on my home media center which uses headless chrome to render an html page that shows my calendar and some other info to an image and send said image back to the requestor to display onscreen.

In case it helps clarify, Terminus was designed to replicate our Core server with the full ability to host in the cloud if desired. This means splitting up the services so you can organize/optimize your stack with fault tolerance as necessary. The goal is to streamline this further in the future.

You can even out the logic on the microcontroller :)

I did that with a pico: https://github.com/AdrianCX/picohive-epaper

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