It really is the small things, fun being able to use hacky superpowers like this. makes me want to call my mom :)
MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
161–170 of 259 posts
Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
#162Really nice project. One idea for “if we fail to take down a message that no longer applies, it confuses her.” Put a start and end date/time on messages and implement in the board. That way you can pre schedule them and have them fall off automatically.
Would also be good to display the current date alongside the messages' date
It looks like it's at the top of the screen
Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there any plans to have a version without the battery? It looks exactly like what I've been looking for otherwise. Also, what country are the orders shipped from? US?
curious what your use case is without a battery. currently you could keep it plugged in, are you wnting NFC-powered etc?
Nothing spectacular, I just want to have a display by the door that shows various things I'd like to check on before leaving, like: which windows are open, outside temperatures, etc.
I don't want a battery because:
- although every X months is quite ok, I don't want the hassle of remembering to charge it (first world problems, I know)
- but I also have a fear of leaving devices with a battery plugged in for a long time / having to monitor for battery swelling or other abnormalities
I already have a classic battery-powered display which shows temperature info from some sensors and it's really convenient, but annoying when the battery is dead right when you need the info. Even if that only happens every X months.
Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having done this, you will also most likely want to setup a javascript timer that also triggers a refresh in case the meta refresh fails. And a weekly reboot of the machine in case there is a memory leak or some other issue.
I tried to do pretty much this on a Kobo reader and discovered the Kobo browser doesn't support javascript. :|
It sounds like there’s a lot more edge case complexity to this than the GP originally thought.
Like most DIY tinkerer solutions, unfortunately, which is why people like paying money for productised solutions - the time it takes to debug and troubleshoot home made solutions is often prohibitive for a lot of people who aren’t techheads.
Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes same for me on guitar. If I try to play something too slowly or if I really start thinking about what I'm doing it all falls apart. I think that's when you really know a piece, when you can play it incredibly slowly. Paradoxically it's easy to play quickly and just let your fingers play out their muscle memory, playing something really slowly is the challenge.
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…
Reminds me of https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm
I wonder if what you describe is kind of the reason for this.
Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
#166I wish this had come up on HN (or I had had that idea myself) some years ago when my mother suffered from that same cruel condition, for the last four years of her life. With her body, all her older memories and her considerable intelligence largely intact, she had multiple moments of clarity every single day, in which she fully realized the terrible and hopeless situation she was in. But of course, within seconds th…
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Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
#167I wish this had come up on HN (or I had had that idea myself) some years ago when my mother suffered from that same cruel condition, for the last four years of her life. With her body, all her older memories and her considerable intelligence largely intact, she had multiple moments of clarity every single day, in which she fully realized the terrible and hopeless situation she was in. But of course, within seconds th…
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They did not say it was dementia, and they did not offer care suggestions - they merely shared their own related experience.
Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
#168> 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…
> so early websites couldn't even place text over images
I take offense at this! We weren't that stupid back then! We just put the text 5 times on the page, with position: relative, 4x in the outline color, each copy with a 1px offset in a different direction, and the final one in the text color. That trick worked with pretty early CSS.
Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
curious what your use case is without a battery. currently you could keep it plugged in, are you wnting NFC-powered etc?
Nothing spectacular, I just want to have a display by the door that shows various things I'd like to check on before leaving, like: which windows are open, outside temperatures, etc. I don't want a battery because: - although every X months is quite ok, I don't want the hassle of remembering to charge it (first world problems, I know) - but I also have a fear of leaving devices with a battery plugged in for a long ti…
A GP in this thread linked to Inkycal, which is a RPi0W based solution, no batteries:
Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just an aside, but “parish priest” must surely be the opposite of “software developer” on the Hacker News Table of Occupational Frequency. Neat!
The principal of my son’s former school was a Sister of St Joseph, and a huge HN fan. More amazing was how creative the sisters were in managing themselves with technology. Many decisions are made by votes, done in real time globally! Religious people get short shrift.
Reminds me of the monks in the third season of Babylon 5. Who says you can't both be an IT person and a cleric?