Did anyone here get one of those Trmnl dashboards? I’ve been wanting to build an e-ink dashboard for years but it keeps not happening, so I ordered a Trmnl X as soon as I read about it.
There’s a bit of a delay on shipping, and early adopters on Reddit were negative, but I’m excited!
— apparently one of the issues was magnets not sufficient to hold it to a fridge. THE CASE HAS MAGNETS! AND THEY’RE UPDATING THEM!
There is a big list of plugins, including apple calendar and HA dashboard, which I’m most interested in
Anyhow, if you got one, please share your experience
It’s not quite the same because it has a lot less screen estate, but I can 100% recommend Home Buttons. You can either build it yourself (3D printed enclosure, custom PCB) or buy one already built for you. They each fancy an e-ink display you can configure with Material Design Icons (or even custom text in case of the bigger one). They integrate into Home Assistant via MQTT and can be fully used for any automation you would like. You can even change the 4 or 6 button labels using Home Assistant.
While I’m not a fan of them using WiFi, cool idea!
I was tempted until I learned a bit more about the guy behind TRMNL.
Now I transformed a 4" supermarket price tag into a dashboard using the OpenEPaperLink project. It works fine but took some time to set up. And the ESP C6 that is talking to the tags crashes every few days. Still need to figure out how to fix that.
I have one and it’s great, although I don’t have any HA information on it, as I don’t have a lot of information worth having on a screen that’s not live data.
Could you share what you do find useful? I see a big catalog of plugins.
For me in HA, I have
- 6 temperature sensors. I like seeing the trends, relationships, and trying to optimize, trying to make my house more consistent and comfortable
- 3 humidity sensors and likely to increase. Humidity control s a battle I’ve been fighting and want more info and more ways to respond. Notably this past year my addition got a heat pump with a dehumidify setting
- Airthings Radon sensor - 7 different measures of air quality I can work on. Seeing trends can identify events with harmful results
- EV charger and status
- I do want to work on measuring energy usage, but haven’t gotten very far yet
But I’m really looking for the family calendar on the fridge
my current list of plugins:
- peanuts and xkcd strips
- moon phase
- weather forecast
- Strava activity summary
- GitHub activity grid
- a custom plugin I wrote that shows a different kanji each day
I’ve converted an old Kindle into a TRMNL and connected it to their Laravel server running in a Docker container.
It’s okay-ish, but the use is limited. Either it switches between different screens every few minutes and you never see the thing you’d like to see in the moment. Or, you can put 4 different things onto one screen but they’ll be tiny.
I seem to be more of a push-based kind of person who prefers information to come in the right moment via an alarm or notification.
I definitely like seeing the data as well.
But …… I’ve got a bunch of Inovelli switches where the status led is controllable, and am hoping to turn that into an alerting system. It’s fairly low key but if every light switch is blinking yellow, for example, it should be quickly noticeable from everywhere. I have to get back to setting that up
I’ve got one of the original models. I just have it set up with the TRMNL cloud version at the moment and it’s pretty cool, but there is a setup where you can run a HA add-on to mirror a dashboard to the screen. I would miss my imprecise literature clock though…
I had a couple in my cart until I realized þey weren’t touchscreens. It’s still a nice product; I just don’t have a use case for a read-only dashboard myself. It’d be nice if you posted back wiþ your experience, þough.
I personally am not interested in touch screen. Interactive use isn’t really compatible with e-ink. I’m interested in sharing data
Edit: or I understand the limits of this technology so the uses I have in mind are not interactive.
