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This is cool. Yet it reminds me of a recent insight, after hours of conversation with Home Assistant geeks: Software is not their issue. Display hardware is (b
by kadrian12 15d ago
This is cool. Yet it reminds me of a recent insight, after hours of conversation with Home Assistant geeks:
Software is not their issue. Display hardware is (but they'd never admit that).
They've usually got all their data in their Home Assistant, tracked by often > 400 individual devices & sensors, visualized in several dashboards. But rarely does anyone actually put that data into their physical spaces, because there's no obvious choice for small-sized screens, long-lasting batteries, cheap, customizable. Something like Trmnl comes close, but is too expensive for most.
So their data stays in the Home Assistant app, mostly accessible through their & their partner's phones and maybe tablets.
If someone manages to build & sell cheap, easily customizable e-ink displays in various sizes, that would enable so much more creativity with custom dashboarding. Imagine every small concern gets their own screen AND their own physical place.
Am I missing some obvious, great solutions to this?
- danialkhilji 15d ago[flagged]
- ryanckulp 15d agoif TRMNL is too expensive, get a cheaper 3rd party option then: 1. flash our* OSS firmware (https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-firmware https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-firmware) 2. spin up an OSS server client (https://docs.trmnl.com/go/diy/byos#implementations https://docs.trmnl.com/go/diy/byos#implementations) 3. install the Home Assistant plugin (https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-home-assistant https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-home-assistant) no need to write any code or give TRMNL a penny, while still benefiting from a few years of deep dev in this area. * i'm on the team
- danialkhilji 14d agoOh nice, I didn't know the firmware and server were open source. I've seen your products on youtube videos but only seen TRMNL as a hardware product with built-in software. Knowing you can flash a cheaper display and run your own server changes things. I'll check out the firmware repo, thanks for pointing that out.
- K3UL 15d agoThis is so true, especially to have it more seamless in the house and a better wife acceptance factor. I had a "discussion" on this exact subject with Claude recently, trying to figure out how to do it. The final suggestion was a mix of a regular small tablet (control center), e-ink tablet (like trmnl) for a couple status dashboards, and the part that i found the most interesting: electronic shelf labels. There is a protocol called OpenEPaperLink that has native integration for HA, and then you can buy various size of tags on sites like AliExpress. I have not yet tested it so it's just an LLM output for now, but I do like the idea.
- danialkhilji 14d ago[dead]