I can’t believe the price on e-Ink displays still. Unbelievable that they’re more expensive than IPS OLED screens of similar size.
Small market dominated by a monopoly.
The Invisible Screen – An E-Paper Smart Display
41–50 of 132 posts
Re: The Invisible Screen – An E-Paper Smart Display
#42From the creator: "It’s not open source and you need the backend for it to work." They alluded to open sourcing the software/API if the business ever goes under, but obviously that'd not guaranteed. Such a shame, I'd be willing to pay more for a product that was actually open.
Thank you, this is exactly the information I was looking for.
If it would be a nicely built frame with a display and a microcontroller (flashable with a custom firmware, or with a simple and sane local API where I can upload a full bitmap via USB and/or WiFi, with no cloud requirements) I'd buy this in an instant.
I have a Waveshare 7.5" display for some Grafana dashboards, but I'm all thumbs when it comes to building a physical case for it, so the circuit board just dangles on a wire in an ugly cardboard box.
A shame, indeed. I have no use for a display that can't even show what I want (or needs a third-party service and Internet connectivity for this). I guess, it's most likely hackable if the case can be opened, but I'm not exactly willing to fight it for $150.
Re: The Invisible Screen – An E-Paper Smart Display
#43I don’t really understand how it is still trendy to pretend that everyone uses Google for email and calendar. I get that the SF crowd was all about it, but if the last few years have taught us anything it is that there’s more to the techie world than VC free money startups. I reckon there are far more people who need this and who might buy this who are using Outlook/Office 365 either alone or in some combination than…
I use Google for email and calendar still. Never really found a way to transition off of it. :(
There are plenty of ways! I can personally whole-heartedly recommend Fastmail if you don't mind paying a bit for your email (and I believe that something as important as email is worth paying for).
There are two aspects that make this easier than most people realize:
- You will theoretically retain your existing Gmail address forever, even if you close your Gmail account. This means you can reactivate it at any time.
- You can use your new email address as the sign-in ID for your existing Google account. This means you can continue to use Google Docs, YouTube, etc and stuff without being reliant on Gmail.
I wrote a short guide a while back here: https://www.justus.ws/tech/how-to-ditch-gmail/
Re: The Invisible Screen – An E-Paper Smart Display
#44Pictures are deceitful, screen is only 7.5", fair price I'm not sure, no details on SDK.
> no details on SDK.
The "develop your own content" link on the top page links to:
https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...
I guess being able to display custom images is a plus, but I am not sure I would call that a SDK.
Re: The Invisible Screen – An E-Paper Smart Display
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d imagine the creator uses Google calendar, made it for themself, and then decided others might like to have a pre-built version. “Trendy” probably doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Creator here. That's exactly what happened.
Creator: If you decide to move this to a full-fledged startup, it should:
1) Have a touch screen
2) Integrate with Outlook calendar and multiple Google calendars
3) Integrate with smart home features (e.g. lights, temperature, etc)
4) Integrate with other data sources (e.g. news)
At $150, be open-source and open-hardware (at a lower price point, I'd do without).
I'm looking for something like that.
Until then, neat product!
Re: The Invisible Screen – An E-Paper Smart Display
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
It certainly appears like 15".
Wow, sorry, that was not my intention. I am going to have new pictures taken anyways, I will try to make sure to add some size references. There are a bunch of photos here. Which ones would you say are the most suggestive of a bigger screen size? I can maybe re-sort the images to prevent confusion. Last thing I want is a customer ordering something, them being unhappy and me having to process a return. That's always…
Definitely include a banana for scale.
(But seriously, showing something like car keys hanging next to the currently-isolated shots would help a lot.)
Re: The Invisible Screen – An E-Paper Smart Display
#47I was looking for something like this. But the API looks not so good. I always dreamed of something like this that has an API where I can send html to render and completely locally.
Creator here. I plan to support HTML rendering but I can't promise anything. You can already point it to an image url with an image in the right resolution on the internet, and it will render that. But for pointing it to an HTML page, you need a headless browser and that comes with a bunch of practical issues.
Neat device!
I don’t see any obvious answer for this, but how often does it query / refresh the image URL?
I’m thinking of writing some script to just push an updated image to something like https://example.com/dashboard.png every 15 minutes or so.
Re: The Invisible Screen – An E-Paper Smart Display
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Creator here. I plan to support HTML rendering but I can't promise anything. You can already point it to an image url with an image in the right resolution on the internet, and it will render that. But for pointing it to an HTML page, you need a headless browser and that comes with a bunch of practical issues.
Neat device! I don’t see any obvious answer for this, but how often does it query / refresh the image URL? I’m thinking of writing some script to just push an updated image to something like https://example.com/dashboard.png every 15 minutes or so.
It will refresh within a minute or two of you pushing the updated version.
Re: The Invisible Screen – An E-Paper Smart Display
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Creator here. That's exactly what happened.
Creator: If you decide to move this to a full-fledged startup, it should: 1) Have a touch screen 2) Integrate with Outlook calendar and multiple Google calendars 3) Integrate with smart home features (e.g. lights, temperature, etc) 4) Integrate with other data sources (e.g. news) At $150, be open-source and open-hardware (at a lower price point, I'd do without). I'm looking for something like that. Until then, neat p…
No offense to you, but this comment sounds like one of those customers that are never going to use your thing, even if you implement all that.
Find the people who want to use a product despite all the lacking features, because the one thing it does is exactly what they need, and build on that.
Re: The Invisible Screen – An E-Paper Smart Display
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d imagine the creator uses Google calendar, made it for themself, and then decided others might like to have a pre-built version. “Trendy” probably doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Creator here. That's exactly what happened.
Hi Creator! Nice looking product!
Is it necessary to have the content proxied through your API server? If the company doesn't work out, it would be a shame to have this device stop working, even though it's fully capable of reaching the internal URL I would be hosting my content on.
Could that be changed?