r/homeassistant: a daily e-ink 'newspaper' on the wall shows train times, with Victorian, 1950s and Star Wars themes
A charming, practical build, and the builder explains the real limits of colour e-ink displays in the replies.
A London commuter shares a framed e-ink display that, at 5:20 every morning, shows whether their train is on time, the Jubilee line's service status and the day's weather, styled to look like a vintage newspaper or flyer. They write that they built it on Home Assistant with a Seeed E1004 frame and used Claude to get a working prototype, then made themes based on a Victorian newspaper, a 1950s magazine cover and Star Wars; AI tools refused to help with the Star Wars theme over copyrighted material, so they designed that one by hand. In replies, the builder says the frame wakes once a day, downloads one image and goes back to deep sleep, so a charge should last six months or more, and that a script converts each image to the screen's six ink colours.
About 1,300 upvotes in a 386,000-member community. Many replies ask for the code (the builder says they will try to post it); some call the look generic AI style, which the builder rejects at length, and several say the frame's price put them off.
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E Ink
After exploring Finally did something! Made a daily e-ink display, the screen technology itself is explained in E Ink.
Wikipedia describes E Ink as a brand of electronic paper display technology, commercialized by the E Ink Corporation, co-founded in 1997 by MIT undergraduates and a Media Lab professor.
Wikipedia · Wade · 5 min
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Dither
After exploring Finally did something! Made a daily e-ink display, the trick that lets six ink colours look like more is Dither.
Wikipedia explains dithering as deliberately applied noise that hides quantization error and prevents patterns such as colour banding in images.
Wikipedia · Wade · 5 min
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