It's a shame that it's not easier to pull the e-ink displays out of used e-readers because you can buy old Kindles on eBay for about $20-40. I know you can jailbreak them and achieve something similar to OP, but it'd be neat if you could just drop the vendor's e-reader firmware entirely and run your own software.
[0] https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/9.7inch-e...
[1] https://soldered.com/product/inkplate-10-9-7-e-paper-board-c...
I wonder what their battery life is, and which wireless protocol they use.
The link you provided appear to probably be IR based, but it was one of the brands that was a dead end for official docs when I was looking at them.
The newest ones seem to be using Periodic Advertising with Responses (PAwR) that was introduced in Bluetooth 5.4, but I couldn't find those type for a price I was willing to pay.
Nordic Semiconductors has an Apache licensed SDK and RToS, I didn't find the device and time to play with it but bookmarked it.
https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Development-software/nRF...
His previous company was called fomo, which added popups to ecommerce stores to manipulate users into buying by claiming that others had recently bought the same product. I haven't dug into it to prove that the data was fake, but it's highly likely it's fake.
He sells marketing courses where he boasts about techniques like exploiting a website vulnerability to spam 20k people who never engaged with him at all.[0] He also proudly shares how he lied to 78k inactive users to trick them into responding to an email.[1]
[0] https://www.ryanckulp.com/targeted-outreach-email-with-20-li...
1. i'm very proud of Fomo. for 6 years we fought against fake data. i said "no" to many lucrative opportunities that were not ethical. our vision was "to given entrepreneurs the credit they deserve," and our mission was "to help consumers make better buying decisions online." your comment is libelous. [1, 2]
2. as of yesterday, all 11 of my courses are free. i've helped over 10,000 people learn to code and learn to sell. [3]
3. on the side i do a bit of pen-testing. i help stop* scammers, and i help non technical folks protect their brand. that's why Bubble added me to their home pages and dozens of cash bounties have been sent my way. [4, 5, 6]
[1] https://blog.fomo.com/having-a-vision-works/ [2] https://blog.fomo.com/introducing-honest-marketer/ [3] https://x.com/ryanckulp/status/1907099032616378815 [4] https://www.ryanckulp.com/hustlewing-is-a-scam-so-i-hacked-i... [5] https://bubble.io/security_acknowledgements [6] https://bubblesecurity.gumroad.com/l/unhackable-101
Since you're accusing me of libel, I just checked the fomo website, and I can see that right now, it's presenting fake data. It shows a live updating counter of the number of fomo's impressions and clicks, but these numbers are updating every 200ms based on client-side JS, not real data. From the HTML source:
setInterval(function() {
var serverTimestamp = 1743654982;
// impressions
var imprCountWhenChecked = 19546526366;
var imprFrequence = 80;
var freshImprCount = Math.ceil(imprCountWhenChecked + (Date.now()/1000 - serverTimestamp) * imprFrequence);
document.getElementById('statisticsTotalImprCount').innerHTML = freshImprCount.toLocaleString('en-US');
// clicks
var clickCountWhenChecked = 43316684;
var clickFrequence = 0.15;
var freshClickCount = Math.ceil(clickCountWhenChecked + (Date.now()/1000 - serverTimestamp) * clickFrequence);
document.getElementById('statisticsTotalClickCount').innerHTML = freshClickCount.toLocaleString('en-US');
}, 200);
If the site fakes that data and you've publicly admitted to lying to your users in other cases, it increases the odds that other data you presented was inauthentic.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20181101030710/https://fomo.com/
I bought one because I think the software and the ecosystem is worth the price, but it's not terribly hard to make one of these for much less than $150.
I've done no research yet though, what's the problem of reusing a kindle screen? It's not like old displays where you can plug a ribbon into something else?
[0] https://blog.lidskialf.net/2021/02/08/turning-an-old-kindle-...
[1] https://www.instructables.com/Amazon-Kindle-e-ink-Screen-Tra...
https://github.com/vroland/epdiy
For the kindles that have wifi, custom firmware is probably easier?
https://blog.jgc.org/2023/04/a-personal-weather-picture-usin...
https://github.com/skorokithakis/calumny
It's a really fun project, but I wish these Waveshare displays had more open firmware. I didn't really manage to get the ESP32 to talk to the display (or even to connect to it, as I don't have the right adapter), so I used their sample code with its weird API and I'm sending an image straight to the ESP32, rather than have the ESP32 pull it from an HTTP server, as I wanted.
- [1] https://usetrmnl.com/recipes/
- [2] https://docs.usetrmnl.com/go/diy/byod
Disclosure: I work at TRMNL.
It was very easy to make my own server with reactjs rendering for it. Now, adding new views is super easy and customizable.
My first iteration back in lockdown [0] focused mainly on rain (I'm from the UK), but later versions used a colour e-ink, added a camera to change the background with a selfie and added train times from my local station, along with upcoming birthdays. Reminds me I need to try and write an update at some point!
[0] https://jamesjarvis.io/posts/2020/06/umbrella-e-ink-weather-...
Mine shows weather and tide times at my wife's rowing club. It has the form-factor of a large fridge magnet. This led to the need to be battery powered and therefore very frugal with power - so a RPi wasn't feasible. It uses an ESP32. The data itself is collated by an AWS lambda.
Edit Found these: https://asm.transitdocs.com/map
https://railrat.net/ (probably just passenger trains)
This comes from someone in the middle of the country where there’s no train (nearest an hour drive away) and the buses are twice daily. So, yeh, I’m a little bitter :-)
My nearby buses and trains are normally something like one every ten minutes, but I check times before leaving the house (albeit not on an eink thing).
For example this could be an esp32 project
Yes, this could have been a ESP32 project, because that has a network stack included, but it doesn't have an LVDS LCD interface, so you're going to have to implement one or the other on any 'simple' microcontroller.