Hacker News Reader

Comment by catapart | Hacker News Reader

Wow! There's a dynamite product in here that pairs a daily nagging app and one of these displays so that people are reminded to take a new picture, ever day, and have it show up on someone's (or all subscribed) photo frame.

I'm thinking, like, "take a photo of the kids so it will show up on Grandma's frame" kind of functionality. Though, obviously, it would also be used for porn, so there's a market there, too.

Anyway, very good DIY proof of concept. I hope it's productized with some of the more recent E-Ink updates soon!

View on HN

This display offers a simple API to build applications for it:

https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...

It's black-and-white, but dithering allows to show surprising detail and it brings its very own old-school aesthetic.

The API doesn't require any special knowledge about e-paper displays, it just expects an image URL in the correct resolution and will then render it to the display.

An app can be made public, such that other people who own the display can install it as well.

If you are interested in building an app, contact me at info@invisible-computers.com for a developer account :)

Is this for sale still? It shows sold out on the site.

I will hopefully have stock again soon.

I think it’d be a little more honest if the first sentence started with „I offer a display with a simple API“.

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

> If you are interested in building an app, contact me at info@invisible-computers.com for a developer account :)

It's not like I am hiding it? I just didn't think it mattered in that context that this is me.

But I see your point.

No worries. I actually like the display. Looks neat.

If the grandparents enjoy getting physical mail and like hard copy photos to have around the house, then https://nanagram.co is a good option[1] You just text in your photos and they printed and shipped once a month. We use it for my mom to send baby photos and she loves it.

[1] Full disclosure: my older brother built this service, but I don’t have an affiliation other than being a proud brother and happy customer.

Agree, used it a few years ago and it brought joy to my grandpa.

We don't have anything to nag us, but the grandparents and aunts and uncles all have Nixplay[0] frames that we regularly update with photos of the kids.

[0] https://www.nixplay.com/

That's cool. Do you know if these are hackable at all? Or do you have to use their service to push pics?

That is the key on a product like this. $5+/mo for a service to occasionally update photos on a device that is already sold at a profit is robbery.

If you're pushing to fewer than 5 frames per account then their free tier works fine. They used to cap the free tier to 1000 photos (we just deleted older photos to keep the collection fresh) but now the free tier supports unlimited photos. I'm sure some day they'll go bust or get bought and it'll stop working but I feel like we've already gotten our money's worth out of it.

Honestly I considered trying to hack one but just never managed to put it on the schedule. Early models had some quirks but now they're reliable enough that I haven't found any pain points that would compel me to open one up so if I ever get around to it it'll be just for funsies.

this won't be a popular suggestion but it works for us: We got the grandparents Nest Home Hub display. It's LCD and there's a switch to disable mic and camera but it works really well for photo sharing.

I bought one for India. My parents don't have a wifi but they have a smart phone with a data plan. Hoping they will be able to enable access point on their phone to sync photos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com