When [Joel Hawksley] and his partner got married, they had a goal to create a home with a healthy relationship to technology, which largely means avoiding smartphone use. Smartphones aren’t without their benefits, though, like being clocks and calendars, so [Joel] started looking for other options to replace these capabilities. At first he went with a “magic mirror” solution, but quickly pivoted to a wall-mounted e-paper solution he calls Timeframe which has evolved into a respectable overview for his home and life.
E-paper has a number of advantages over LCD and LED displays, one of which being that its resemblance to real paper makes it feel more organic. The first e-paper iterations of Timeframe used multiple displays in wooden frames, and [Joel] had a few different ones stationed around the house. They received their data from a custom-built Rails backend which sent pictures to the devices. This made the refresh rate possible fairly low, but a new 23.5″ display from Boox eventually enabled an acceptably high resolution and refresh rate which could support more traditional display uses. But this display required that [Joel] rewrite the entire back-end, an effort that took quite a bit of time but resulted in an impressive final product.
Like any custom-built project like this, [Joel] still has plans for improvements including those around further integration with his Home Assistant and reducing costs for future platforms. E-paper displays are popular pieces of technology for home dashboards like this, in the past we’ve seen similar, smaller builds which coincidentally have the same name.
Yes, very nice! Maybe I could sell a kidney to afford that kind of ePaper panel…
Wow ! One kidney only, it is so much cheaper than in my country
The 25″ e-ink panel is gorgeous, but appears to be >£2k
The price stopped me from digging further also. I looked around to see what e-ink displays were mostly going for and generally they max out around 13″ for ones that are good for DIY (and ~$200-300USD). All of which is too expensive for me to just “try out”.
Switchbot has their 31.5″ display for $1300, which is nice for the size, but it requires working with their app to upload images. I was wondering if they allowed them via API or a direct connection but they do not. Otherwise, it would have been the extra step of generating an image, but it could have “hidden” as art normally.
Absolutely stunning. Way out of my price range, but stunning to look at. If that was affordable I’d buy a bunch of them.
For once, a rich person building a good looking smarthome. Really neat build.
Wait five years, all that will be obsolete and you have to rewrite the system to keep it working. IoT relying on cloud services is a red queen’s race.
The Display is dump – actually HDMI/DPi is used. So you can drive it with a RPi zero. There is no inherent cloud requirement left. Home assistant you could even host the same RPi Zero.
Not inherent, but this implementation does. rely on cloud services. They have to keep fiddling with it every few years to keep up with Google, Apple Weather, etc.
Have a look at em32dx from Samsung – 760€, 7 primary colours and it can dither up to 65k colours. If you look at it, the picture look like paintings. It can render text ultrasharp and crisp. https://github.com/vgavro/samsung-mdc is supposed to be able to push data (I didn’t try, yet), but I wrote my own tizen app which can pull the data I want directly.
That’s awesome, thanks for the hint.
I have been trying to build something like the display featured in the article for quite some time but the displays were either to small or to pricey for it to become feasible.
700€ is still a lot but already much better than 2k€.
Does someone have more experience in interfacing the em32dx display?