Keep 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.
Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule
111–120 of 134 posts
Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule
#112What 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…
WaveShare 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 m…
Is there a way to use them in a low power setup, with a battery that lasts at least several days?
Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 op…
It feels fairly reasonable imo to specify something like "this uses phantomjs with the following screen size" and just say peoples work has to fit that.
Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 op…
> "Render the page in X width and Y height and then take a screenshot".
Isn't this the exact example of phantomjs?
``` page.viewportSize = { width: 600, height: 600 }; ```
At least that is what I use to do for screen testing for some of our low-hanging-fruit QA. At some point I rewrote it in puppeteer and it was as simple as the above line.
The screenshot results in being the X/Y size.
I'd be interested in why this doesn't work in your usecase.
Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule
#115If 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 tak…
Are new Kindles still hackable or are they fully closed like consoles?
Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 op…
I made something almost exactly like this before. I needed to convert svgs to pngs and have them display the same way they looked in the browser. It turned out that spinning up chromium and taking a screenshot was the easiest thing way to do that. I think I used puppeteer.
Headless Chrome seems like it should be able to do what you want pretty easily. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/headless-chrome/
Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 op…
Hi! A while ago I had exactly the same problem and thought process, so I made this: https://github.com/SmilyOrg/website-image-proxy
Hopefully you find it useful :)
Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule
#118Hi 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…
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Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule
#119If 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 tak…
Are new Kindles still hackable or are they fully closed like consoles?
I 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…
Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule
#120Earlier 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.
Anyone got it to work with Nextcloud?