Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Really the "hidden story" is the pimoroni board is like "ten bucks" whereas two years ago the exact same application was available from Adafruit for "fifty bucks".

I have two of the adafruit variety and it works fine with circuitpython and all that.

Someday the "wifi connected eink screen" will drop to maybe five dollars and that will be interesting in the market, open up some product ideas.

The adafruit product uses most of its power sleeping and occasionally waking up to check the wifi in the apps I played with, the screen itself doesn't use much power. I suppose it depends how often you want to refresh.

An example of interesting/weird apps for this technology is we're already at the point where its probably cheaper if you want a remote thermometer displaying on your wall to skip owning an actual thermometer and just display some web API of the current airport temperature or whatever. I wouldn't invest in consumer grade high resolution temperature sensors, you can replace all of that with a little wifi traffic right now and it's only going to get 'worse'.

You can reuse a cheap old Kindle for "wifi connected eink screen", see e.g. my Kindle Dashboard (https://github.com/niutech/kindle-dashboard) or Kindle VNC (https://github.com/niutech/kindle-vnc).

> skip owning an actual thermometer

Doesn't that rely on you living next to someone else's thermometer that's published? My not very accurate setup gives me more than a degree just down my property line (~30m) largely because one end is next to a road and the other on lawn surrounded by trees. Albeit neither are proper meteorological stations so accuracy in that sense isn't even an option.

I publish a few readings but have never really looked into the exact accuracy of the https://www.uradmonitor.com/ sensors. My actions in response are pretty coarse so it doesn't matter a huge amount... PM10 goes over 300 and I close the doors and windows sort of thing.

Tangent: My gas station replaced grade-selection buttons and rate/volume/price LCDs with one huge (20") touchscreen. Unfortunately because of the distance, it's brighter than the overhead lights at night. No one thought to add a little brightness sensor to the several thousand dollar machine.

Tangent off your tangent: Do you have one hose at each pump at your gas station and you just select which grade of fuel you want? I've never seen that before. In the UK they have multiple hoses, and you choose which one by picking up the right hose.

Not the commenter you asked, but in the United States pumps with one hose are common. All the grades of petrol are dispensed through the same hose, and you just select which one you want.

Some pumps do have two (or more) hoses, especially those that have multiple types of fuel (one for regular petrol, and one for diesel). Some pumps for also have separate hoses for each grade, although they seem less common to me.

Eh, Adafruit is always 10x overpriced regardless of what they're selling. That's kind of their shtick.

$16 for a 296x128 eink display may be cheaper than it used to be but it's still not affordable enough for mass adoption for this kind of thing.

I think of their products as priced to reasonably support a small business in the US, and frankly support open source development of products.

They’re expensive, but I don’t think they’re overpriced.

Sure, but after running all that RnD just about anything they make is reverse engineered immediately and perfect clones start being sold at rock bottom prices everywhere else. Whoever invests into extensive development with the intent to recoup costs via sales is the real sucker in this industry. Even official institutions like schools and universities rather order from aliexpress instead.

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