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 is what I use: https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-7-5-ePaper-Panel-p-6416.html
Using ESP Home Builder in Home Assistant I can push updates to it.
It works, but for me its far too much work for what it is. Updates are a pain in the hole, and come fairly frequently.
I’ve just ditched it now to be honest.
I was using it to display the weather where my wife worked each morning so she could dress accordingly. It did what it was supposed to do but was too much work. Wireless firmware updates seldom worked and it needed to be connected to a computer to reliably update.
For me personally the convenience isn’t there. Compare it to a similar sized tablet that I can run Fully Kiosk in to display a Home Assistant dashboard that updates effortlessly, and its a non-runner.
May be absolutely fine for other use cases but for me it was prohibitive. Battery life is a few months based on waking up each morning to refresh and going back to sleep until the next morning, but, you can’t monitor the battery level, a known issue with these. That simply is bananas!