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Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

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Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#51

Post by dh-g »

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.

Yea, to avoid this I run tbis device(kindle non-touch v4) unplugged and get 3 months on a charge with a fairly new battery.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#52

Post by stavros »

I did kind of the same thing with a LilyGo display, and it looks amazing:

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.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#53

Post by wjdp »

scottwick wrote: post #7

Does 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.

I'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.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#54

Post by dh-g »

scottwick wrote: post #7

Does 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.

It 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.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#55

Post by yankput »

I 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.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#56

Post by ignorantguy »

afavour wrote: post #10

An 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)

I have an old ipad Mini running ios9. there is an app called liveframe and it has integrations with google photos. i have been running it as a picture frame for a couple of years now

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#57

Post by EvanAnderson »

konschubert wrote: post #41
plugin-baby wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks really neat! Does it have an ethernet port? And maybe PoE?

It'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)

The 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?

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#58

Post by dh-g »

omershapira wrote: post #40

The 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

Yea 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.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#59

Post by landgenoot »

politelemon wrote: post #9

I 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 requ…

I 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.

Re: Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

#60

Post by dh-g »

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…

Very nice. You've made a beautiful looking device. I'll be in touch.
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