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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

#31

Post by tootie »

NikxDa wrote: post #2

This is super cool, and I wish something like this existed at my place, as it enables information sharing without the need for phones/actual screens that shine in your face when the lights are low or tempt you to doomscroll. That said, the large primary display this uses is $2000. That's very hard to justify for any "normal" household, and that's without any mounts, backend, services etc.

I have a similar setup at home with a homemade dashboard. It's less polished and I've never implemented smart home (don't use any smart home devices) but it's calendar, weather, air quality and subway alerts. I also took the tack of building the UI with Bootstrap 3 so that it will run on any of my ancient devices like a gen 2 ipad air. I did it as much to usefully recycle old screens as anything else.

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

#32

Post by noelrock »

A project, ZerryBit, are working to do something similar - albeit on a far smaller scale physically than what you’ve done here. Might be of interest to OP or others though - further info at https://zerrybit.com/en-us (I have no link to them bar placing an advance order)

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

#33

Post by galleywest200 »

ojagodzinski wrote: post #15

~3000€ to show information in some random places in the house even though the household members have a device with a screen called a smartphone next to them 24/7 ? Well, it's cool, but the usability of it all is below average. Declutter your life and don't install any more screens in your home ;)

Alternative: just keep your phone on your charger in your room and declutter your life by using just the one screen in the kitchen.

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

#34

Post by lm28469 »

galleywest200 wrote: post #33
ojagodzinski wrote: post #15

~3000€ to show information in some random places in the house even though the household members have a device with a screen called a smartphone next to them 24/7 ? Well, it's cool, but the usability of it all is below average. Declutter your life and don't install any more screens in your home ;)

Alternative: just keep your phone on your charger in your room and declutter your life by using just the one screen in the kitchen.

Keep it in airplane mode until you need it, the friction is enough to keep it out of hand, and it never asks for your attention by itself. Or at least disable every notifications

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

#35

Post by stared »

Nice!

Though, $2000 is a step price.

I had some fun with using an Inkplate e-ink display - bough a bare 5" for €74 (a 10" with batteries is there €219). Smaller, but also way more affordable.

It connects via WiFi, and make it display random, vide https://github.com/SolderedElectronics/Inkplate-Arduino-libr....

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

#36

Post by yellowapple »

ojagodzinski wrote: post #15

~3000€ to show information in some random places in the house even though the household members have a device with a screen called a smartphone next to them 24/7 ? Well, it's cool, but the usability of it all is below average. Declutter your life and don't install any more screens in your home ;)

For those who lack the technical aptitude to use a smartphone (e.g. children, the elderly), a device that shows information in random places in the home is much more useful.

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

#38

Post by yellowapple »

bengale wrote: post #6

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

Here in Reno, especially at this time of year, constant knowledge of the weather = constant knowledge of whether to expect road closures / traffic delays from snow, or whether I need to add extra time before going somewhere to defrost the windshield and remove snow, or whether I should grab a jacket.

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

#39

Post by xd1936 »

IshKebab wrote: post #28

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…

There are several ways to get all events for the day! The easiest one in my experience has been to write a simple Apps Script project and expose that as a published Web App[1]. That moves all of the oAuth logic and Calendar API plumbing to Google's server-side code, and gives you a simple long URL that contains exactly what data you want.

Something like:

```

function doGet(req) {

  let start = new Date();

  start.setHours(12,0,0,0);

  let end = new Date(start);

  end.setDate(end.getDate() + 3);

  let events = CalendarApp.getEvents(start, end);

  return ContentService.createTextOutput(events.map(x => x.getTitle()));
}

```

1. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/web

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

#40

Post by JoshTriplett »

AuthAuth wrote: post #18

This is awesome but I still find it funny that he said he wants a healthy relationship with technology then goes and fits his entire house out with technology. It doesnt seem like any of this would really be useful as you'd have to enter all the useful data manually(calendar). For example the washing machine. You dont need real time information because you know how long it takes since you've done it 1000s of times an…

> For example the washing machine. You dont need real time information because you know how long it takes since you've done it 1000s of times and it beeps.

It beeps, on the other end of the house (or on another floor), where it's inaudible. (And, thankfully, where the loud sounds of it operating are also inaudible.)

> All these things are just managed in our heads subconsciously.

And when you remove the need to track that in your head, your head gets freed up for other things.

To be explicit, I don't like "smart appliances" that connect to a cloud server. I do like the idea of devices that can connect locally to something like Home Assistant.

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