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Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

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Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#101

Post by ArchOversight »

konschubert wrote: post #28

Hi 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-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 emai…

I would love to use your product, but there is certain data I can't send through a remote proxy (like my work calendar). Is there anyway to run whatever the backend is locally on a machine on my network? Or to have the device pull from a custom URL that is local to my network instead?

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#102

Post by IshKebab »

omershapira wrote: post #91
KennyBlanken wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame that this open-source project is lower than the guy spamming and astro-turfing his locked-in calendar display.

To be fair: 1. His project does allow rendering any 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.

Also it actually looks nice. But I do agree it's lame that it's locked down.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#103

Post by konschubert »

ArchOversight wrote: post #101
konschubert wrote: post #28

Hi 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-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 emai…

I would love to use your product, but there is certain data I can't send through a remote proxy (like my work calendar). Is there anyway to run whatever the backend is locally on a machine on my network? Or to have the device pull from a custom URL that is local to my network instead?

This isn't possible yet. I want to add as an option that in the future, but it's not possible yet. Sorry :(

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#104

Post by konschubert »

avivo wrote: post #98
konschubert wrote: post #28

Hi 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-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 emai…

If you can provide a script that takes in an HTML file and provides an image ready for rendering, that would be amazing. Then I can automatically take any website and have a cron job that dumps the result into a shared dropbox link where it can be used by the screen.

> If you can provide a script that takes in an HTML file and provides an image ready for rendering, that would be amazing.

Yea, that's something I have been trying to build, but it's surprisingly non-trivial. There are a bunch of headless browser options, but I haven't found a good way to tell them: "Render the page in X width and Y height and then take a screenshot".

That seems like a problem that should have 100 open source solutions for it, and I am sure there are some that work really well! But I personally haven't found one yet.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#105

Post by ripley12 »

isoprophlex wrote: post #79
dh-g wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

I 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... Edit: can you believe it? https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-frame-7-3?variant=40...

I've been playing with one of those for the last month, made a little household dashboard thing: https://twitter.com/reillywood/status/1705373370215449033

The refresh time blows (something like 30 seconds), but otherwise I've been pretty happy with it.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#106

Post by iforgotpassword »

capableweb wrote: post #24
iforgotpassword wrote: post #18

I 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.

> 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.

No you can't. That works for laptops but not phones, tablets etc.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#107

Post by nightpool »

realharo wrote: post #76
nightpool wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also they don't like being kept in hot enclosures without adequate ventilation / cooling.

That'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…

OP 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.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#108

Post by pitched »

konschubert wrote: post #94
phanimahesh wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you proxy eveything through your api backend? Can the device not check the url directly? Also, does the checking result in full image download always or do you respect etags and other caching headers like if-modified-since?

> Why do you proxy eveything through your api backend Because it makes development and maintenance soo much easier, faster and reliable. I don't have to debug stuff that breaks on somebody's embedded esp32. If something breaks, it's in the backend and I see it in Sentry. > Can the device not check the url directly Yes, it could (with some modifications). But then you need to transmit and store the URL on the device,…

Instead of having your backend download and retransmit the file, you could return a redirect to it instead? Plus maybe lower the poll rate from a few times per minute to once an hour or so to avoid the need for caching to save battery.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#109

Post by jwong_ »

Recently 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.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#110

Post by salzig »

konschubert wrote: post #49
carimura wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second sentence mentions an API, but then, no API docs anywhere...?

The docs are here: https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma... I admit that this is still a bit rough around the edges... As a simpler alternative, if you just want to build some layout for yourself and you do not need user management, you can simply render it as an image on the internet and point the device to it: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

> Privacy Information: Plese note that the data is proxied through the Invisible Computers API backend and a non-reversible hash of most recent image is stored for up to 48 hours.

Wait? It's always proxied through your service? So there is no way to show something on the screen without you also being able to see it? That's a big nope for me.

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