Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

jan.miksovsky.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 259 posts

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#81

Post by oliviergg »

grahameb wrote: post #3

What a beautiful use of technology to uphold someone's personhood, and let them know they are loved, despite (and with regard to) a profound injury. This reminds me of a desire I've had for a long time: a simple, wall-mountable eInk device that could be configured with a URL (+wifi creds) and render a markdown file, refreshing once every hour or so. It would be so useful for so many applications – I'm a parish priest…

If you have a hacker’s soul, an old Kindle, a jailbreak, and a Python installation, anything becomes possible. I’m working on something like that (though I hadn’t thought about markdown!). The Kindle is a particularly fun device once it’s hacked!

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#82

Post by inanutshellus »

grahameb wrote: post #3

What a beautiful use of technology to uphold someone's personhood, and let them know they are loved, despite (and with regard to) a profound injury. This reminds me of a desire I've had for a long time: a simple, wall-mountable eInk device that could be configured with a URL (+wifi creds) and render a markdown file, refreshing once every hour or so. It would be so useful for so many applications – I'm a parish priest…

assuming your eink display would be on the same LAN as some always-on PC...

  1. install python
  2. make a file named `index.html` somewhere. 
  2a. put this in the "head" tag, so it'll refresh hourly: ``.
  3. run `python -m http.server` from the same folder
     This will start a single-threaded web server on 8000
  4. On another machine on your network verify you can pull up http://firstmachine:8000/. 
  5. having proven it works, go buy an e-ink display and point it to http://firstmachine:8000/, make it the default homepage.
Voila.

Any time you have anything to say, just edit the `index.html` file and the eink display will update.

No need for fancy subscription services or kickstarter projects or crowdfunding... just... batteries included python.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#83

Post by ryanckulp »

joseda-hg wrote: post #9
grahameb wrote: post #3

What a beautiful use of technology to uphold someone's personhood, and let them know they are loved, despite (and with regard to) a profound injury. This reminds me of a desire I've had for a long time: a simple, wall-mountable eInk device that could be configured with a URL (+wifi creds) and render a markdown file, refreshing once every hour or so. It would be so useful for so many applications – I'm a parish priest…

I'm in, can we crowdfund something like this? If eInk wasn't a monopoly this would be 100% a project I'd love to do

we crowdfunded one this summer and now we ship same-day. :) https://usetrmnl.com

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#84

Post by joseda-hg »

ryanckulp wrote: post #83
joseda-hg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in, can we crowdfund something like this? If eInk wasn't a monopoly this would be 100% a project I'd love to do

we crowdfunded one this summer and now we ship same-day. :) https://usetrmnl.com

Doesn't seem like you ship to my region, cool product nevertheless

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#86

Post by ryanckulp »

joseda-hg wrote: post #84
ryanckulp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we crowdfunded one this summer and now we ship same-day. :) https://usetrmnl.com

Doesn't seem like you ship to my region, cool product nevertheless

ah really?? feel free to email us (team@usetrmnl.com). we've been granted a bunch of EC licenses lately but maybe missed a few country check boxes on our store.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#87

Post by rosslh »

zackmorris wrote: post #35
albert_e wrote: post #19

> One small challenge was maximizing the size of the message text. Sometimes a message is just a word or two; other times it might be several sentences. A single font size can’t accommodate such a wide range of text content. I couldn’t find a pure CSS way to automatically maximize font size so that a text element with word wrapping would display without clipping. > I ended up writing a small JavaScript function to ma…

I've been watching the evolution of the web since 1995, and I remember when css got popular in the late 90s thinking that it didn't match real-world use cases. Somehow design-by-committee took us from drawing our sites with tables in the browser's WYSIWYG editor, to not being able to center text no matter how much frontend experience we have. Css jumped the shark and today I'd vote to scrap it entirely, which I know…

Your comment is some interesting food for thought, but I wanted to respond to a couple statements you made:

> not being able to center text no matter how much frontend experience we have

Not being able to center things is a bit of a meme, but flexbox was introduced back in 2009 and has been supported by major browsers for quite a long time. Centering text and elements is now extremely easy.

> css could benefit from knowing about the dimensions of container elements

You're in luck! Container queries were added to CSS fairly recently:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_contain...

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#88

Post by dghughes »

cka wrote: post #67
withinboredom wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran into this when teaching my son to tie his shoes. He now ties his shoes “upside down” from me, because I tied it from my perspective. It’s surprisingly hard to tie shoes in slow motion, it took some practice by paying attention to myself tying shoes quickly. Now I’m wondering if you can tell a kid is from an “even” or “odd” generation by which way they tie shoes…

My kid just figured it out, so generation parity can break

It's like UK coins the new monarch face stamped on it faces the opposite direction compared to the previous one.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#89

Post by gknoy »

ryanckulp wrote: post #44
steezeburger wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a backer, but this would probably fit your bill https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/usetrmnl/trmnl-the-e-in... I wanted the same kind of general eink device, but this is also supposedly super hackable!

hackable indeed :) https://docs.usetrmnl.com no longer a Kickstarter btw, shipping same-day now (see homepage)

For anyone else that followed the "buy a device" link on the docs page, and found yourself on the (ended) Kickstarter page, editing the URL to https://usetrmnl.com/ works :)

(This is fantastic. Thank you for sharing about it!)

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#90

Post by philips »

ryanckulp wrote: post #44
steezeburger wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a backer, but this would probably fit your bill https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/usetrmnl/trmnl-the-e-in... I wanted the same kind of general eink device, but this is also supposedly super hackable!

hackable indeed :) https://docs.usetrmnl.com no longer a Kickstarter btw, shipping same-day now (see homepage)

> Most IoT products support SSH-ing directly into peripheral devices. We've heard too many horror stories about how this can go wrong, and decided to invert the paradigm.

> Your TRMNL device pings our server, never the other way around.

> Each request made to our /api/display endpoint includes only the minimum details needed to support customers -- an API key, device mac address, firmware version, battery voltage, and wifi signal strength.

Super hackable but it pings their hosted server and nothing else?! Is there a way to run your own server?

Post reply on HN