[keyle]

If this kind of device would come in 'off the shelf' ready to go, I'd buy one. I think e-Ink screens are really attractive to be hung on the wall.

I hope we're going to see such device come to life; my bet is some successful kickstarter followed by an amazon clone with alexa built-in :vomit-face:

+1 for a simple device that does one thing, and does it well.

[COGlory]

Someone on HN was manufacturing one that showed your Google Calendar:

https://www.invisible-computers.com/

[IshKebab]

That is not battery powered and judging by the lack of side photos I imagine it is unsatisfyingly thick.

[frownz]

There are more pictures here https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...

[IshKebab]

Ah ok it does look thin enough. Still a bit hard to tell tbh. Why no photos of the back?

If they made a battery powered one I would buy it.

[djmips]

It can be configured to show weather.

[ISL]

I'm super excited to see the price on panels beginning to drop. $200 for a 10" panel is, for an old guy, exciting.

Once they're cheap-enough, the manufacturers will come.

[seanp2k2]

Look up “field monitor” on Amazon, there are some for under $100 (usually 7” 720p native res panels). A lot of them have 1/4” or 3/8” stud mounts for mounting as well, some can accept common batteries like LP-E6 for portable usage, some are touchscreens with USB etc etc. Pretty hacker-friendly hardware. I keep a couple around for pis and terminal access to servers.

[Denvercoder9]

Those things don't seem to be e-ink displays, which (imo) makes a huge difference in applications like this.

[sircastor]

Me too. I just looked at the Wave-share 12.78” Red/Black/White display, and they’re listed for $178. If I weren’t juggling 4 other projects, I’d pick one up. It’s cheap enough to support all kinds of projects.

[shultays]

Be aware that those 3 color screens are very slow to update, 15-20 seconds. So not super useful for most kind of projects

Unfortunately the fast color displays (we can buy) are not there yet. Only black & white (and grayscale) ones are fast enough to be used as somewhat generic screen you can interact with

[Nursie]

> Be aware that those 3 color screens are very slow to update, 15-20 seconds.

I just did a project with one. You are right, the three (or more) colour screens do indeed have very slow update cycles, and they usually don't support partial refresh either (just updating part of the screen)

BUT there are some tricks you can do. You can start most of them in two-colour mode, which does support partial updates, and you can define and upload a custom set of waveforms that govern how the screen performs its refresh and update cycles. I wrote an email to the company I purchased from (good-display) and they were very responsive and sent me some waveforms to try. These allow a much faster update (~1s) at the cost of some slight greyness, which gets worse over time, needing a full refresh after a while.

The resulting code I wrote now does something like -

  - start device (colour)
  - draw background in colour (15 seconds)
  - every minute, restart device (B/W) and draw 'active' areas (1 second)
  - every 15 minutes redraw background (full screen update, 15s)
  - every 24 hours run a screen refresh routine(1 minute plus)

It's not ideal, but it does allow you to do something like a static background image in color, then a clock and a few gauges that update more frequently.

(my screen refresh routine cycles each pixel through each of the colour transitions, black->white, black->red, white->red, and the reverse)

[shultays]

I wasn't aware that you could only update BW like that in a faster way, I don't remember such API on waveshare ones. Maybe they don't have that, or maybe it is not something officially supported and part of public API

[Nursie]

So yeah, the good-display screen and the waveshare ones I think are the exact same hardware, not really sure 100% on that. I wasn't really using an API, I just used the SPI interface directly and implemented my own API on top (in fact I made a simple TLV protocol over USB to drive the RP2040 zero, which then performs the right SPI magic to drive the chip in the display which then.... the number of processors in this setup seems excessive)

Effectively I had to piece together some clues. There was the manual for the screen which gave the definition of the SPI protocol in use, and the commands you could send, what they did, screen startup sequence etc. They mentioned waveforms and modes a bit but it was frustratingly incomplete and it looked like there were gaps in the commands described. Then there was a youtube video of a guy showing how he'd implemented fast refresh on some other model of screen by uploading custom waveforms, who mentioned looking for waveforms in sample code and for chip specifications. This lead me to the original docs for the driver chip on my display (an ultrachip UC8179) which had the missing commands specified. Using these along with the waveform (LUT) definitions supplied by the vendor when I asked them for some, allowed me to make the fast mode.

I presume some commands were missed out of the vendor document as a lot of them were non-essential, and possibly could cause harm(?). Certainly the wrong waveforms could lead to poor performance or no performance. Also the chip spec document didn't give some of the higher level "Here is the startup sequence for your screen" flow chart niceties of the vendor doc.

(The waveforms are literally describing how the screen should apply voltages to transition a pixel from one colour to another. The default ones that the screen ships with are good for a 'full' refresh of the pixel, but you can get away with a lot fewer, faster voltage switches for B/W, at the cost of quality declining over time, which you reset with a periodic 'full' refresh)

[sircastor]

Yeah. They take a while, but as long as your project is only dealing with static images/data, you can update it at inconspicuous times. I recall seeing a calendar project that used a display like this. The red was used to highlight important things, and it only has to updated when something changes.

The full-color (7 or 8 colors to mix) take forever to update, but if you’re just displaying a photograph, update it at 2am and no one knows the difference.

[ISL]

That's really cool. By the time I have a chance to hack my own, I suspect there'll be commercially-available Raspberry Pis in frames.... :).

[MivLives]

I have an eink internal thermometer/hydrometer I bought off the shelf. Hooks up to wifi if you wanna log, works fine without it. Runs off 3 double as. The brand is govee, I don't know the rules on linking to Amazon so I'll refrain. Search Govee Eink.

They seem to be trying to limit full refreshes but they're very distracting when they happen, suggest keeping it out of eye line.

[hinkley]

I must spend at least a couple days a year for the last 15 fantasizing about having a wireless information radiator like this.

The idea first came to me in the era before BYOD was an okay thing. It was a huge struggle to put anything on the network, like a board saying how broken the builds are. And punching holes in walls or having dangling cables is always a problem, even at home, hence wireless.

eInk is pretty much the only candidate for a device that sleeps most of the time and wakes up momentarily to poll for data.

[samstave]

I have an "off the shelf" weather screen (albeit color) and it was great for my house - but had an external sensor that went outside - and it took a battery (the sensor did), but it had a small slit to let telemetry air in... and it got wet in a rainstorm and stopped working, so I had to take the screen down.

[Daneel_]

I use an old ipad combined with DAK Board. No real setup required other than setting up DAK Board how you like and creating a full-screen shortcut to the page on the ipad so it shows borderless.