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I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

hawksley.org

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Re: I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

#21

Post by 9dev »

SeriousStorm wrote: post #13
bengale wrote: post #6

I’m always surprised how much people seem to want to constantly know the weather.

Agreed. Especially the current weather conditions. That's mostly useless info. Knowing the weather forecast for tomorrow or this weekend is actually useful. It's strange that pretty much every weather widget assumes you want to know the current weather conditions and not the forecast.

Eh, depends. If you have a dog, and live in a place with actual seasons, February requires frequently checking the current conditions before you head out—at least where we live, it could be anywhere from -10°C to +12°C right now, raining, snowing—annoying to put on a light jacket because you let the sun fool you, and discover it's freezing and starting to rain once you're on the field.

That said: I seem to get by pretty well with a lowly smartphone so far.

Re: I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

#22

Post by chrisweekly »

thechao wrote: post #20
bengale wrote: post #6

I’m always surprised how much people seem to want to constantly know the weather.

I had Windows^(TM) installed in my house when it was built. We're on the top of a 700' hill, so The Weather is pretty accurate.

Ooh that reminds me of my weather rock.

Re: I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

#23

Post by connorshinn »

This is really cool, thanks for sharing the journey so far.

One potential idea - it might be worth looking at overseas manufacturers to see if they can offer a similar display at a better price point. I did a bit of digging on Alibaba, for example, and found a 25" E-ink display with the same resolution as the Boox for around $1000 (and the price goes down to $500 if you order 100 units or more): https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/25-3-inch-e-paper-dis...

Seems like they offer a color E-ink display option as well, which could be worth exploring.

Note: I don't have any affiliation with the above company, it was literally just the first one I found when searching. I'm sure there are many other options available as well.

Re: I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

#24

Post by hinkley »

Information radiators are basically 80% of the reason I try to keep tabs on wireless power delivery. Then a Kia and Hyundai vendor thought they were going to get their wireless charging added to the EV6 and Ioniq vehicles and that’s the other 20%. Essentially they removed the transformer from the PSU and moved it to the air gap between the charging coil and the vehicle to halve the parasitic losses. You’d have a car you didn’t even need to plug in.

I’ve been following Information Radiators since practically the beginning, and wiring has always been one of its problems. First networking and now power. In homes, but also in office spaces. The best locations for radiators are often the worst for wiring.

And eInk displays move the needle because you have a device that can go completely to sleep between updates, which means it can trickle charge.

Re: I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

#26

Post by lukebuehler »

Wall-mounted dashboards are a huge life-hack, especially if you have a family. We got a 37-inch touchscreen one, running DAKBoard.

We have several kids and have been organizing our daily todos and calendars on it for several years. We used to drop the ball quite a bit due to a hectic schedule and the dashboard has helped us tremendously. Since it is mounted in the kitchen, being able to pull up recipes is a plus.

Re: I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

#28

Post by IshKebab »

This is cool. I bought an Inkplate for this and got as far as writing a custom image format suitable for e-ink sort of things (4-bit RLE; trivial to decode, but good compression for diagram/text type images).

Where I got stuck is calendars... Unfortunately Google Calendar doesn't seem to provide a nice API where you can just say "give me the events for these days", instead you can only download all of your events in iCal format. It's then extremely non-trivial to convert that information into "what is happening today".

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