Tag: hardware

Using Laravel and an e-ink tablet to make a DIY digital sign for dynamic office window message display

I wanted a sign I could mount in the window at the front entrance of our newspaper’s office to display customizable information about our office’s current status and other useful info.

If you’ve ever researched this category of products, you know there are many vendors out there who will happily sell you very expensive devices and supporting accessories to make this happen. This is “call us for pricing” level product sales meant for hotels, convention centers, malls and large office buildings, not for a small community newspaper on a budget.

Even the few standalone products I was able to find for sale on Amazon and elsewhere seemed pretty janky. I’d have to download an app or install a hub with a proprietary communication technology or be constrained to a certain number of characters and layout, or some other limitation I wasn’t quite happy with.

I decided to ask the Fediverse:

A Mastodon post that reads: "A hardware product that seems like it should exist but that I'm having a hard time finding: * E-ink sign to go in a store window and display basic text (open/closed, etc) * Wifi connected, no hub or cloud subscription needed * Programmable via some kind of API or app, refresh delay is fine * Battery or plug-in is fine Suggestions? (Edited to add: Unfortunately I don't have time to assemble one from parts.)"

(I learned while writing this that Mastodon posts do not seem to embed in WordPress seamlessly – tragic!)

At first, the responses were reinforcing how difficult this might be to find, but then my colleague Scott Evans made a comment that sparked the eventual solution:

I feel like an e-ink reader of some kind might be your best bet (one that can run Android apps). Then you could install a kiosk style browser and update the page it’s pointing at. Something from Onyx?
https://toot.scott.ee/@scott/statuses/01JKBE3QZWEZCMN2QZZH75R6BY

After some searching I found this wonderful blog post by Jan Miksovsky, MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia. Jan described using a BOOX Note Air2 Series e-ink device to create a dynamic sign display for Jan’s mom. They used a web browser to load a simple website that would display the latest customized messages based on details configured in web interface elsewhere, source code here. I love it!

I emailed Jan with some questions about the setup and Jan was kind enough to write back with a clarification that the original BOOX ability to launch a web browser on device restart appears to have been removed, but a request is in to restore this functionality.

Jan also had a helpful thought about how to launch the browser in to full-screen mode, which I haven’t tried yet: “That’s controlled by whether a website has a web app manifest defined for it. If it does, then the browser “Add to Home Screen” command should allow you to add the site to your home screen. When launched, it should open in full screen mode.“

I found a used Note Air2 device on eBay for $189 plus shipping and tax. A non-trivial expense, but far less expensive than any of the other options I was finding.

When it arrived I turned off all of the “auto-sleep” type settings so that the device would basically stay on all the time. I tested out having the web browser stay open on one page for days on end, and it worked! Now I just needed to figure out my own web interface to manage the sign message.

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Life so far with a 2020 13″ MacBook Pro

I recently switched from using a Mid-2015 15″ MacBook Pro to a 2020 13″ MacBook Pro with Apple’s Silicon M1 chip. It was a Big Deal in the sense that my computer is a primary daily tool in my personal and professional life. So much of my work, my creativity and the management of my life is handled through this one device, so it’s always a little scary to make a change. (I actually could have been happy continuing with my previous laptop if its battery hadn’t been expanding, causing the entire computer to bulge in weird and alarming ways.)

Here are a couple of things I observed in making this transition and in using the MacBook every day since:

Apples to Apples

My previous MacBook Pro was pretty high end (2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 Processor, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM, Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB Graphics, 1TB HD) and very fast for the things I used it for. These included software development, hosting multiple software development environments, audio and video editing and rendering, graphic design and photo editing, and LOTS of browse tabs. It took everything I could throw at it and I never felt slowed down by the computer itself.

So the idea of “downgrading” to a smaller screen (13″ instead of 15″), fewer ports, and the same amount of RAM but 5 years later was a bit nerve-wracking.  Conventional wisdom for a long time was that 13″ MacBook Pros were fine for some kinds of advanced computing but that the 15″ model was always the best option for the kinds of things I use it for. Maybe this was just me naively buying into Apple’s marketing, but it seemed to be supported by testimonials from colleagues over the years, and was a strong narrative in my head nonetheless.

But I’d heard and read that the Apple Silicon M1 chip was a game-changer, and that any comparison between Intel and the newer processors was not really valid. And after seeing enough stories from real users where they said the new chip plus 16GB of RAM was even faster running some of the same software I do, even with Rosetta 2 translation turned on, I was sold.

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