I recently found the author clock, and it inspired me to do my own version. I won’t actually bother with the clock function; just an e-ink display in my living room I can control. Something I can feed whatever text I like and have it rotate periodically. From a quick look around, I’m finding Waveshare, Inkbox, and TRMNL. I’m looking for something I can have some degree of remote control over so I don’t have to go plug it in constantly. It seems like all three can achieve this. I don’t love the looks of the Inkbox or TRMNL, and they’re more expensive. The wooden housing on the author clock would look really nice in my space and I’d love to recreate that. But I wanted to see how difficult it is to frame up, set up, and maintain a Waveshare before I dive in. Particularly since it seems that you need to integrate a pi for those.
This may be totally off base from what you’re targeting, but maybe an ESP32 running ESPHome and connected to an E-Ink display such as those sold by Waveshare? https://esphome.io/components/display/waveshare_epaper/ You would probably need some separate system set up to actually generate the content displayed on the screen, depending on what exactly you want to show. It would require a fair amount of work, but would likely be the cheapest and most flexible option.
There’s a feature in ESPHome which allows the device to call a URL to download an image at specified intervals, then display it on an attached screen https://esphome.io/components/online_image/#online_image which would require running a service somewhere that generates/renders a new image at regular intervals and makes it available for download via a local URL. For just simple text, I assume there’s a simpler way to update what the device shows over the network.