Hacking eInk Price Tags (2021)

[kibitzor]

I've been sitting on the idea of putting several of these tags around the house and have them display quote, jokes, and facts.

The best guide I've found so far is this one [0], as it uses easy to procure tags + guides on GitHub + offers an application to auto-upate tags via screenshot area of a website and seems like it could be done in an afternoon.

However, I'm hoping to find an even more streamlined approach that I could turn into a gift to others (assuming they want a 3rd party device on their network), where the tags sync to a raspberry pi (or similar cheap USB powered device), and it uses very cheap tags, if anyone has done this or has plans.

[0] https://youtu.be/BCkMu57S_YA?si=BsSXEladdZHvcC57

[stavros]

Does he mention a price or part number at some point? I'm quite a good way in, and he hasn't mentioned anything, and the description is empty.

EDIT: I see the description now, they're called Hanshow Stellar and sell for $20-$25 a piece. Not the price point I thought of when I heard "cheap", but eh.

[atVelocet]

Good read but I have one question: What’s the address of the chinese documents site he is talking about?

[dmitrygr]

pudn

[rbtying]

I found this a couple months ago and it was an amazing resource (thanks dmitrygr)!

I ended up using atc1441's base station firmware[0] because it's a bit of a pain to actually pop open the case and get the programming pins on the Chroma 74

[0]https://github.com/atc1441/E-Paper_Pricetags

[coretx]

Bookmarked for future reference! Awesome work.

Furrtek has been playing with those things too. Maybe he knows things you don't and vice versa. https://github.com/furrtek/PrecIR

[gcormier]

Perhaps relevant - https://github.com/OpenEPaperLink/OpenEPaperLink

[bloopernova]

I wish there was a self-contained e-ink 10 inch screen that would just sit on my network and accept URLs to display in sequence. Possibly with an equivalent to a Raspberry Pi 3 to SSH into.

[manmathmo]

I have one of these which is basically what you describe. Marketing materials focus on the Google calendar integration but you can also feed it images via a URL which it polls regularly.

https://www.invisible-computers.com/

[xnx]

I followed this guide and was able to do almost exactly that: https://matthealy.com/kindle

[blixt]

You could take a look at a project I recently made, it’s very easy to put together and run a server to do what you want!

https://github.com/blixt/sol-mate-eink

[lokimedes]

https://soldered.com/product/inkplate-10-9-7-e-paper-board-c... You can do that with this.

[afandian]

You can get a kindle to display a self-refreshing webpage in the browser. Only issue is keeping it awake somehow.

[ryukoposting]

This is one of the best firmware-related technical writeups I've ever read on HN. The author doesn't overstate the nightmare that is 8051. I can personally vouch for its horribleness, and its cockroach-like persistence.

As a hobby photographer who mostly shoots black-and-white film, readily available info about generating grayscale images on eInk displays is intriguing from an artistic perspective.

[Bluestein]

TL;DR: It does run DOOM :)

[sam_bristow]

A "Carmack Complete" system as I've started calling them.