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Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule
- kevinwang 3y agoNice, I literally just started to build something similar on a waveshare and raspi!
- artursapek 3y agoVery cool. I’d been thinking about building something like this. Do you look at it every day? Seems really useful.
- Neil44 3y agoThat's cool. I regret throwing my ancient kindle away now. The expensive corporate version of this is called a Joan - https://getjoan.com/digital-signage/ https://getjoan.com/digital-signage/
- gregoryl 3y agoOoft. 900 euro and a subscription.
- rmccue 3y agoA more affordable alternative to this is the Inkplate series, which uses recycled e-ink screens from tablets: https://soldered.com/categories/inkplate/ https://soldered.com/categories/inkplate/ The software runs on an ESP32 and is all open source: https://inkplate.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://inkplate.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- foul 3y agoIt's affordable but some displays cost as much as waveshare displays, and waveshare displays are new, not refurbished/repurposed.
- Semaphor 3y ago> I regret throwing my ancient kindle away now. Amazon also gives you a 20% discount for buying a new one, if you send the old one in, even if it doesn’t work at all anymore.
- michaelbuckbee 3y agoI use a Kindle Fire (non E-ink) tablet as a dedicated calendar viewing tool as: 1. It's very easy to put it into developer mode and set "don't lock screen if plugged in" 2. I can just open it to a web page of my calendar. This is great as I don't get nerd-sniped into some dev project trying to set it all up and actually get a functional calendar so I don't miss things.
- scottwick 3y agoDoes this use the battery? Not clear to me if the Kindle program is running continuously or if it just periodically starts up, refreshes the screen and then powers back down.
- stronglikedan 3y agoI presume it does, but would only need charging once every couple of months. If it's going to be in a fixed position, e.g., on a desk, then it could just be left plugged in.
- wjdp 3y agoI've set up my own DIY version of this. It pulls a new image via a cron job and repaints the screen with it. I've not invested time looking into it but by default if the device sleeps, which it does very quickly after loosing wall power, the cron job will no longer run and the display gets stuck. You need to poke the power button to get it to wake again.
- PascalW 3y agoInstead of using a cronjob you can put the device into sleep and use the RTC to schedule the next wakeup (see [1]). This takes only very little power, as the device is only turned on for mere seconds and sleeps the remaining time. [1] https://github.com/pascalw/kindle-dash/blob/main/src/dash.sh#L93-L94 https://github.com/pascalw/kindle-dash/blob/main/src/dash.sh...
- dh-g 3y agoIt goes into deep sleep and only wakes up once a day after midnight. It gets about 3 months on a charge. I use to leave it plugged in but got sick of looking at the cord.
- Waterluvian 3y agoThe crispness of e-ink is 99% of what makes me want it for semi-static displays. It’s just ridiculously satisfying to look at.
- 0x38B 3y agoMore than any other piece of technology I own - phone, laptop, watch - my Kindle makes me happy. A big part of that is the display and it's paper-likeness.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI also love how simple it is. It’s a book of books. No distractions. It does what it does well. Waterproof. Battery lasts forever. I’m getting into having more purpose-built gadgets even if they seem to 70% overlap with each other. Reading a book on my phone or tablet just isn’t the same.
- hinkley 3y agoI just wish I could figure out a power scheme that would make it worth my trouble to use them as information radiators. Perhaps rechargeable batteries. Displays like this would be a good candidate for wireless power schemes, but they aren’t sited in places with a good set of power scavenging options. Maybe solar.
- politelemon 3y agoI repurpose all my old ereaders (Kindles and Kobos) into displays for something, weather, agendas, some even do images (albeit very low resolution). It's great to have these around the house, quietly doing their thing. One thing I will point out from observation, the radios on ereader devices aren't great for heavy use; they were originally created for occasional syncing. Projects like these will require an HTTP request to somewhere to fetch data, on a regular basis, and the radio eventually stops working. It's not a terrible thing considering it's just an unused device. If you're looking for something longer lived, the waveshare screen are worth considering for mini projects.
- Yoric 3y agoI want to repurpose an older Kobo as a multipurpose boardgame accessory (e.g. with dice, a bunch of custom card decks, etc.) Do you have any pointers on where to start?
- ta988 3y agoKobo are super easy to hack. There are a lot of examples in the mobileread forum: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_eReader_hacks#Writing_your_own https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_eReader_hacks#Writing_...
- landgenoot 3y agoI don't think the resolution is the problem with images on e-readers, but the amount of grayscale levels is. Dithering works brilliantly on these devices. I made a photo frame out of one of these by calling some imagemagick from golang.
- dh-g 3y agoNice result. I agree, dithering on these devices works really well. After this project I worked on displaying images of the sun from the NOAA satellite. Until I got dithering working displaying the image with just 4 levels of grey was was very lackluster.
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- afavour 3y agoAn aside but I’ve long thought that if Apple was truly committed to the environment and equipment reuse they’d let us use old iPads for stuff like this. I’d love to make a digital photo frame/day planner from an old iPad mini I have kicking around. They could even integrate Siri etc. (I know you can get some way toward this with various apps but it’s definitely not the same as something OS-level)
- ClassyJacket 3y agoMy work does something like this with Surfaces and unfortunately if you leave devices like that plugged in all the time the batteries swell and bend the screen and frame. Maybe they could soft lock them to 50% or something but under normal circumstances it's too dangerous.
- alexb_ 3y agoWhy would Apple ever be "truly committed" to something which gives them less money? They have no reason to encourage people to use old technology.
- donor20 3y agoThey have by far the longest support historically compared to the rest of the ecosystem. It’s not even close. A while ago my parents bought an android device that SHIPPED one version behind and was never updated. Totally pathetic. I’ve seen fixes for surprisingly old iOS devices and even new features often go back some generations.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- afavour 3y ago> Why would Apple ever be "truly committed" to something which gives them less money? Because they claim to be!
- ignorantguy 3y ago
- Arubis 3y agoIf you’re not up for DIY, I’ve been using a unit from https://www.invisible-computers.com/ https://www.invisible-computers.com/ for years and I love it. Not affiliated; just a happy customer.
- NikolaNovak 3y agoOoh that looks interesting and not TOO expensive, for a "out of the box" solution. Does it work well / is it self-sufficient without phone once you set it up? Can you adjust the scale, scroll easily, etc?
- konschubert 3y agoFounder here. You can adjust how many of the upcoming days are shown, and you can adjust the first and the last hour of the day. This really allows you to dial in the information density. For scrolling, I am not quite sure what you mean - are you referring to a button that would allow to move the time forward on the calendar? (That doesn't exist yet)
- NikolaNovak 3y agoThanks! I wasn't sure if it's touch-screen (like e.g. Kindle) or an entirely passive unit; so for example if it's showing this week, can a user scroll on the unit to see what's coming next week? :)
- konschubert 3y agoIt's not a touch screen, it's fully passive. A touch screen might be cool, maybe for a future version... but it would drive up the price. From a product perspective, I wonder if people wouldn't rather pick up their smart phone if they want to look at their calendar more deeply. I don't think the device should try to compete with the smart phone, it can only lose.
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
- iforgotpassword 3y agoI did something similar with a first gen kindle. Some day it stopped working, I opened the enclosure to find a completely cracked-open kindle with a battery the size of a weather balloon inside. This was about a month after I returned from a six week trip during which I kept that thing running. Reminder that a lot of battery-powered devices really don't like to be connected to power all the time.
- capableweb 3y ago> Reminder that a lot of battery-powered devices really don't like to be connected to power all the time. Shitty ones don't, yeah. A thing you can do with those is remove the battery fully, so it's not being recharged/used at all.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoNo you can't. That works for laptops but not phones, tablets etc.
- nightpool 3y agoAlso they don't like being kept in hot enclosures without adequate ventilation / cooling.
- realharo 3y agoThat's not an issue for a device like this. The typical use case is refreshing the screen once every 5, 10, 15, etc. minutes, which takes a few seconds (including connecting to wifi, downloading the data, etc.), and then spend the rest of the time in some super low power deep sleep mode, drawing maybe tens of microamps. Or maybe checking over Bluetooth LE whether to trigger an update, once every couple seconds. This will never get hot enough to the point where it would matter.
- nightpool 3y agoOP said that they did this with a first-gen kindle, and I would not be surprised if it had an always-on wifi connection and was processing data much more frequently then you suggest. I agree that there are plenty of ways to build this in a power-efficient way, I just want to suggest that given modern battery controllers, heat is a much more likely cause of failure then keeping the kindle plugged in all the time.
- rtpg 3y agoI have done something like this with my kindle. I then got kind of mad at myself for doing something so utilitarian. I wrote a little script to instead generate random wordle playthroughs, display that, be happy with the code... then immediately throw the kindle in my drawer. Still, "generate a static image from a computer and send it to a display at a certain rate" is an underrated way to do fun things
- 0x38B 3y agoAnother option for displaying things on a jailbroken Kindle is to use kterm to ssh into a computer and then connect to a tmux session. I've used this to read man pages - it's quite satisfying to press 'f' on my laptop and see the page scroll on the Kindle. Connectivity is easy, as you can connect over USB or WiFi (my Kindle connects to my iPhone's hotspot).
- konschubert 3y agoHi OP! You're writing > I use FBInk on the kindle to display the images after curling them from a API Gateway. I am the founder of this smart screen product: https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-calendar https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale... Curling an image is the same approach that I use for my e-paper smart screen as well. It should be quite easy to bring your dashboard to my device... maybe we can work together on something? My email is info@invisible-computers.com
- plugin-baby 3y agoThis looks really neat! Does it have an ethernet port? And maybe PoE?
- konschubert 3y agoIt's powered by a USB plug... is there a way to convert PoE to USB power? And the connectivity is through Wifi. (And Bluetooth during Setup)
- EvanAnderson 3y agoThe PoE to USB solution is a "PoE splitter" and they're cheap and very useful. The website says the device has a USB-A connector for power. That's a bit of an odd connector to power a device from (since A is supposed to be a host port). Is that port really an A?
- konschubert 3y agoI am referring to something like this: https://www.newnex.com/images/usb-2-a-male(UH2-AE)_small.png https://www.newnex.com/images/usb-2-a-male(UH2-AE)_small.png Isn't this called a USB-A plug? EDIT: I cannot respond to the child comment, but yes: The Device has a male USB plug, and then the cable goes right into the device, no receptacle on the device.
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- zephrx1111 3y agoThere are many android eink reader out there the can be used easily for this scenario, why ppl are always bothered on kindle?
- corobo 3y agoKindle popularity I'd imagine. I've got an old kindle knocking around somewhere, I'd rather reuse that than buy a new device to tinker with
- omershapira 3y agoThe most fun part of these projects is seeing people quickly build ad-hoc renderers for E-Ink. Very quickly you find out you need render passes, dithering, debanding, etc. Here's my weather E-Ink board (which consistently gives a faster result than waiting for the iOS weather app to fetch & render): https://github.com/OmerShapira/theres-some-weather-outside https://github.com/OmerShapira/theres-some-weather-outside
- dh-g 3y agoYea doing that the first time was a pain but FBink is pretty widely supported on these type of devices and really lowers the barrier to entry.
- artursapek 3y agoLove your readme lol
- KennyBlanken 3y agoIt's a shame that this open-source project is lower than the guy spamming and astro-turfing his locked-in calendar display.
- omershapira 3y agoTo be fair: 1. His project does allow rendering any HTML: https://www.invisible-computers.com/programmable-e-paper-screen.html https://www.invisible-computers.com/programmable-e-paper-scr... 2. It is in stock. :) Raspberry Pi Zero 2 and the waveshare displays are in a bit of a stock crunch, and the frame I ended up mounting this in, along with the special flat USB cable, pushed the project cost to the same price. It's my own aEsTheTic tho.
- stavros 3y agoI did kind of the same thing with a LilyGo display, and it looks amazing: https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/ I had to turn it into a generic signage platform first (it lets you show any image you want), and then screenshot GCal onto that image. It works really well, though. Nowadays it's an electronic power meter, which also looks great.
- dh-g 3y agoI didn't realise they made 4.7inch version. I find that a little small for my uses but you really did a lot with it. Nice project. I made a solar powered conways game of life with an esp32 and a 4.2 waveshare display but the whole time I wanted a few more pixels.
- isoprophlex 3y agoI have a 7.3 inch, 7 color eink display coming in the mail. Built-in raspberry pico with wifi. Can't wait till it gets here... < 100 usd price, it sounds too good to be true. Edit: can you believe it? https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-frame-7-3?variant=40541882089555 https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-frame-7-3?variant=40...
- ripley12 3y agoI've been playing with one of those for the last month, made a little household dashboard thing: https://twitter.com/reillywood/status/1705373370215449033 https://twitter.com/reillywood/status/1705373370215449033 The refresh time blows (something like 30 seconds), but otherwise I've been pretty happy with it.
- yankput 3y agoI have just bought aranet4, a CO2 meter, which uses eink and I think partly because of that has a ridiculously long 5 year battery life. But I understand why… it’s 169eur, the cheaper CO2 meters are just much cheaper.
- blagie 3y agoWhat I really want is a simply end-to-end way to program these devices to display something: basically, something as easy as QBasic, P5.js, or Scratch. What I don't want is to run a server to host something for them to display. I want it self-contained, so once made, it's alive until the device breaks. My experience is 95% of the cost of these is maintenance, and that goes away once a project is no longer new, glitzy, and flashy. What I actually want to build myself is a clock which displays time in time zones where my friends, relatives, and family are. Most of the other things I'd like are equally esoteric. I'd like this to be a <3 hour project (so it sustains a child's attention span too).
- harlanji 3y agoWaveShare screens are very reasonably priced and are starting to have 3+ color options. Using a RasPi and Python one can simply display any image via Python Imaging and some code to transmit the data via the connector pins. The image remains fixed on the screen even when it's powered down. I got a little screen and the demo code worked, didn't know Python well enough at the time to keep running with it (part of the motivation to learn Python in the past year). Might need some work to build a case/enclosure, but beyond that it's a little piece of hardware that does what you wish. I'm thinking similar things, some specific cases in mind. (I can be hired to do work like this for $15/hr for the first 90 days, contact info in profile).
- joelthelion 3y agoIs there a way to use them in a low power setup, with a battery that lasts at least several days?
- Fnoord 3y agoYeah e-ink uses no power, only when it refreshes. If you refresh say from 7 AM till 11 PM but not in night then WLAN has to fire up (cheap on ESP32 etc) and you could easily use a poor man's powerbank such as 18650 in USB enclosure. Tho I think PoE is neat for a device like this. White cable (assuming wall is white) and you're done. Though I wouldn't rely on a proprietary solution. Nor on Google Calendar. There are plenty of such options available. For example [1] but there's many more. Here another [2]. Can't find the one I got but yeah it broke and remember you need to update the software at times. I put it on a VLAN and guest WLAN to be sure. [1] https://hackaday.io/project/189632-e-ink-weather-station-pumpkin-edition https://hackaday.io/project/189632-e-ink-weather-station-pum... [2] https://www.hackster.io/lmarzen/esp32-e-paper-weather-display-a2f444 https://www.hackster.io/lmarzen/esp32-e-paper-weather-displa...
- landgenoot 3y agoNice project. I did something similar, but with photos. I managed to process everything on the device in 100% golang with imagemagick C-bindings. As Imagemagick is also able to render text, it might be a solution for you to get rid of the need for an external server. The ARM build process happens on GitHub actions, so you can check it out. https://github.com/landgenoot/kindle-synology-photos-photoframe https://github.com/landgenoot/kindle-synology-photos-photofr...
- dh-g 3y agoCool, it looks like your processor is only slight newer then mind and is also on a 32 bit version of ARM so this approach would probably work. I'll keep this in mind for next time mine needs some work. Really nice project.
- Andrew018 3y ago[dead]
- 2bitencryption 3y agoIf you're even slightly interested in getting into jailbreaking/hacking of devices, the Kindle is a great place to start. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit there. Particularly because the device has a USB port and, by design, exposes a user partition that you can read/write to (so you can upload files and documents and ebooks to the device). There's definitely been an effort by Amazon to lock them down, but just taking your reverse-engineering tool of choice and decompiling their firmware binary will give you tons of readable code to dig through. They use a mix of java, native c, and javascript. Fun fact, at startup the Kindle looks for certain files in the user partition, with certain naming patterns. You can, for example, disable the screensaver by dropping a file with a special name there. They patched this once, but after doing a grep for the user-partition mount location (to see all the places in their code where they read from user partition files) I was pretty quickly able to find another way to do this. It's fun stuff.
- miohtama 3y agoAre new Kindles still hackable or are they fully closed like consoles?
- theoreticalmal 3y agoI looked into it precisely once, and found a bunch of results that the newer firmware versions didn’t have jailbreaks available, and that downgrading wasn’t feasible. I’m hoping to be proven wrong though…
- jncfhnb 3y agoStill dreaming of the day when we can have E Ink Dice
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ros86 3y agoI can recommend checking out https://openepaperlink.de/ https://openepaperlink.de/. It's a project to repurpose e-ink electronic shelf labels (in various sizes, ranging from 1.54" to 7.4"). I have been playing around with it the last few weeks and it's a lot of fun! The community around this is very active on Discord.
- jwong_ 3y agoRecently went the DIY route to show a Notion board on my 4th gen kindle. This is much nicer though, as it's optimised for display on the lower resolution screen. I just wanted to avoid having to pull data out of Notion & re-build a UI. Would be nice for some way to apply CSS to a page to make it more viewable.
- demondemidi 3y agoKeep it out of the sun. E-Ink does not like direct sunlight. I built a similar thing, more of central panel for all my home-grown cloud gadgets (because I hate backlit LCD), and after a summer of afternoon sun, half the panel died. Which was a bummer because it was a $300 panel.
- giveexamples 3y agoI've been using a magnetic pad (https://www.plus-vision.com/jp/product/kaite/ https://www.plus-vision.com/jp/product/kaite/) that works on the same principles of eink, except using magnets rather than electric fields. There's many variants available on aliexpress now. The only con is that stray magnets like on computers will wipe the pad if placed too close together.
- ThrowawayTestr 3y agoAll I want for Christmas is for eink displays to be as cheap as commodity LCDs.
- Qwertious 3y agoIt won't happen until e-ink gets a similar scale of production - E-Ink is niche, because it's basically never better than LCDs and is more expensive, so it's only used in e-readers, supermarket tags, and nowadays e-notes, all of which are incredibly niche. This might change if E-Ink corp's fast multi-dye color tech ACeP/Gallery 3) takes off in a big way, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
- polyterative 3y agoI would really buy a generally available ready to hack e-ink display product