[heresie-dabord]

e-ink is low-power and easy on the eyes. But for a cheaper project recipe:

    * repurposed old LCD rotated to portrait mode
    * Raspberry Pi 400
    * Debian with Sway showing various tiled terminals/browser windows
    * self-hosted REST server that collects/provides data to display

[grabshot_dev]

If you go the image-rendering route for e-paper, Sharp (the Node.js libvips binding) is surprisingly good for this. You can do grayscale conversion, resize to the exact panel resolution, and apply Floyd-Steinberg dithering all in one pipeline with minimal memory overhead.

The trick with e-ink displays is that naive grayscale conversion looks terrible because you lose all mid-tone detail. Dithering the image down to 2-4 levels before sending it to the display makes a huge difference in readability, especially for things like weather icons and charts. ImageMagick can do it too but Sharp is about 4-5x faster for batch processing since it avoids spawning subprocesses.