Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule

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If you're even slightly interested in getting into jailbreaking/hacking of devices, the Kindle is a great place to start.

There's a lot of low-hanging fruit there. Particularly because the device has a USB port and, by design, exposes a user partition that you can read/write to (so you can upload files and documents and ebooks to the device).

There's definitely been an effort by Amazon to lock them down, but just taking your reverse-engineering tool of choice and decompiling their firmware binary will give you tons of readable code to dig through. They use a mix of java, native c, and javascript.

Fun fact, at startup the Kindle looks for certain files in the user partition, with certain naming patterns. You can, for example, disable the screensaver by dropping a file with a special name there. They patched this once, but after doing a grep for the user-partition mount location (to see all the places in their code where they read from user partition files) I was pretty quickly able to find another way to do this. It's fun stuff.

Are new Kindles still hackable or are they fully closed like consoles?

I looked into it precisely once, and found a bunch of results that the newer firmware versions didn’t have jailbreaks available, and that downgrading wasn’t feasible. I’m hoping to be proven wrong though…

The most fun part of these projects is seeing people quickly build ad-hoc renderers for E-Ink. Very quickly you find out you need render passes, dithering, debanding, etc.

Here's my weather E-Ink board (which consistently gives a faster result than waiting for the iOS weather app to fetch & render): https://github.com/OmerShapira/theres-some-weather-outside

Yea doing that the first time was a pain but FBink is pretty widely supported on these type of devices and really lowers the barrier to entry.

Love your readme lol

It's a shame that this open-source project is lower than the guy spamming and astro-turfing his locked-in calendar display.

To be fair:

1. His project does allow rendering any HTML: https://www.invisible-computers.com/programmable-e-paper-scr...

2. It is in stock. :) Raspberry Pi Zero 2 and the waveshare displays are in a bit of a stock crunch, and the frame I ended up mounting this in, along with the special flat USB cable, pushed the project cost to the same price. It's my own aEsTheTic tho.

Also it actually looks nice. But I do agree it's lame that it's locked down.

Anyone got it to work with Nextcloud?

what's the screen refresh time like on this? I have a small e-ink display that I got from Adafruit and it takes 10+ seconds to redraw

LTT just did a video[1] on an 25inch E-Ink display[2] that runs at 15Hz.

It worked way better than I thought it would and is a pretty decent size.

Little pricey.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZXrJRpA0Jw

[2] https://www.amazon.com/DASUNG-Paper-Monitor-Knight-Version/d...

The one display I got takes about 2 seconds to cycle. You can make it shorter with partial redraws, but for my purposes, the cycle was the right thing to do.

If you’re not up for DIY, I’ve been using a unit from https://www.invisible-computers.com/ for years and I love it. Not affiliated; just a happy customer.

Ooh that looks interesting and not TOO expensive, for a "out of the box" solution. Does it work well / is it self-sufficient without phone once you set it up? Can you adjust the scale, scroll easily, etc?

Founder here. You can adjust how many of the upcoming days are shown, and you can adjust the first and the last hour of the day. This really allows you to dial in the information density.

For scrolling, I am not quite sure what you mean - are you referring to a button that would allow to move the time forward on the calendar? (That doesn't exist yet)

Thanks! I wasn't sure if it's touch-screen (like e.g. Kindle) or an entirely passive unit; so for example if it's showing this week, can a user scroll on the unit to see what's coming next week? :)

It's not a touch screen, it's fully passive.

A touch screen might be cool, maybe for a future version... but it would drive up the price.

From a product perspective, I wonder if people wouldn't rather pick up their smart phone if they want to look at their calendar more deeply. I don't think the device should try to compete with the smart phone, it can only lose.

Thanks!

Everybody will have their opinion, 100% :)

FWIW: In family scenario, being able to quickly check next week (a simple scroll), can be very beneficial as we plan our kids activities etc (but I understand you don't want to overcomplicate it, and everybody has "just one more thing it needs":). I'll have a chat with my wife on whether it's something she would use as currently is; I'll be happy to share feedback either way if it's helpful :).

Yea, you are definitely not the first one who suggested adding one or two "action buttons", even if there isn't a touch screen. So I am definitely taking that idea seriously.

My heart made a little jump when I saw this, I've been working on this project for years and I do not take it for granted that my users are starting to recommend the product.

I am here to answer any questions anyone might have.

There are some more pictures on the shop page here: https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...

How are the colors of multiple calendars rendered? ( can one be cross-hatched and the other black? )

It's not something I have tried yet. I would be worried about the readability of text in this case.

When it comes to the layout, there is definitely a lot that could be done, that hasn't been implemented yet. I am always working to add features but of course there are always more ideas than time. :D

(For example, I recently, I added the option to display the calendar vertically:

https://shop.invisible-computers.com/cdn/shop/files/IMG_0304...

Oh man, glad you’re still going. For some reason I remember you getting a ton of critical feedback last time this was posted - glad you’ve persisted. Keep on my friend.

Last time I posted, the bezel on the screen was about twice as wide still... :D And even so, while I had a few comments who were ripping me for the huge bezel, most people still liked it! So this actually encouraged me :D

This thing looks like a lot of fun, however it looks like the device is "tethered" to some kind of back-end service you provide, rather than just being a standalone device on the network. Can you explain how communication with the device works?

Yes, it needs a backend service. It is just a dumb screen that pools from a backend URL.

The upside of this is that you can easily configure it remotely, because all settings after the initial setup are stored server-side...

... and it makes the whole development flow easier when you can build, iterate and deploy on a server.

Is there any option to self-host that backend service? I'm not comfortable, from a mental health perspective, with integrating a device into my life routines that could suddenly stop working through loss of a hosted service.

What's the actual communication technology? Is it Wi-Fi? Cellular?

Edit: I see elsewhere you state it's Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. From a Wi-Fi perspective and workplace deployment does it support 802.1x?

> Is there any option to self-host that backend service?

Not yet, I want to support that in future but it's not possible yet. I have personally decided that I will keep the backend running even if I decide the project isn't worth it for me any more... but of course, I understand the this is no 100% guarantee.

> From a Wi-Fi perspective and workplace deployment does it support 802.1x? Uhhh, I don't know.. how would I check that?

You don’t support changing an URL? Why..?

It's frequently visible in the background on Zoom calls, and I get both compliments and inquiries; hopefully a few folks followed through!

Second sentence mentions an API, but then, no API docs anywhere...?

The docs are here:

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

I admit that this is still a bit rough around the edges...

As a simpler alternative, if you just want to build some layout for yourself and you do not need user management, you can simply render it as an image on the internet and point the device to it:

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

> Privacy Information: Plese note that the data is proxied through the Invisible Computers API backend and a non-reversible hash of most recent image is stored for up to 48 hours.

Wait? It's always proxied through your service? So there is no way to show something on the screen without you also being able to see it? That's a big nope for me.

I understand your desire to build out an "ecosystem" of app and everything, however, I'd really like an option to go fully on my own and skip your iOS/android app.

Is it something that you plan on doing and document? Or is there an easy way I can ssh into the device and figure out on my own?

TIA!

EDIT : well, 1 minute later you answered part of my question here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645339. How about ssh-ing?

ssh-ing is hard because there is no USB port. There isn't even an USB controller on the board, just some rudimentary UART pins. The usb plug is just for power.

How does it communicates with anything from the external world? This same channel could be used for sshing or anything

Actually, from another comment

> Privacy Information: Plese note that the data is proxied through the Invisible Computers API backend and a non-reversible hash of most recent image is stored for up to 48 hours.

So there's some mechanism to make API calls to your own cloud infrastructure, but customers can't use it to skip the middleman and send things directly to the device? I hope I'm reading this wrong, because that's awful.

crickets

I repurpose all my old ereaders (Kindles and Kobos) into displays for something, weather, agendas, some even do images (albeit very low resolution). It's great to have these around the house, quietly doing their thing.

One thing I will point out from observation, the radios on ereader devices aren't great for heavy use; they were originally created for occasional syncing. Projects like these will require an HTTP request to somewhere to fetch data, on a regular basis, and the radio eventually stops working. It's not a terrible thing considering it's just an unused device. If you're looking for something longer lived, the waveshare screen are worth considering for mini projects.

I want to repurpose an older Kobo as a multipurpose boardgame accessory (e.g. with dice, a bunch of custom card decks, etc.)

Do you have any pointers on where to start?

Kobo are super easy to hack. There are a lot of examples in the mobileread forum: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_eReader_hacks#Writing_...

I don't think the resolution is the problem with images on e-readers, but the amount of grayscale levels is.

Dithering works brilliantly on these devices. I made a photo frame out of one of these by calling some imagemagick from golang.

Nice result.

I agree, dithering on these devices works really well. After this project I worked on displaying images of the sun from the NOAA satellite. Until I got dithering working displaying the image with just 4 levels of grey was was very lackluster.

Resolution is more important than grayscale for e-ink - not only are they two sides of the same coin for dithering, but e-ink renders far faster in black-and-white so with sufficient resolution you've got a snappier page turn.

What I really want is a simply end-to-end way to program these devices to display something: basically, something as easy as QBasic, P5.js, or Scratch.

What I don't want is to run a server to host something for them to display. I want it self-contained, so once made, it's alive until the device breaks. My experience is 95% of the cost of these is maintenance, and that goes away once a project is no longer new, glitzy, and flashy.

What I actually want to build myself is a clock which displays time in time zones where my friends, relatives, and family are. Most of the other things I'd like are equally esoteric. I'd like this to be a <3 hour project (so it sustains a child's attention span too).

WaveShare screens are very reasonably priced and are starting to have 3+ color options. Using a RasPi and Python one can simply display any image via Python Imaging and some code to transmit the data via the connector pins. The image remains fixed on the screen even when it's powered down.

I got a little screen and the demo code worked, didn't know Python well enough at the time to keep running with it (part of the motivation to learn Python in the past year). Might need some work to build a case/enclosure, but beyond that it's a little piece of hardware that does what you wish. I'm thinking similar things, some specific cases in mind.

(I can be hired to do work like this for $15/hr for the first 90 days, contact info in profile).

Is there a way to use them in a low power setup, with a battery that lasts at least several days?

Yeah e-ink uses no power, only when it refreshes. If you refresh say from 7 AM till 11 PM but not in night then WLAN has to fire up (cheap on ESP32 etc) and you could easily use a poor man's powerbank such as 18650 in USB enclosure.

Tho I think PoE is neat for a device like this. White cable (assuming wall is white) and you're done.

Though I wouldn't rely on a proprietary solution. Nor on Google Calendar.

There are plenty of such options available. For example [1] but there's many more. Here another [2]. Can't find the one I got but yeah it broke and remember you need to update the software at times. I put it on a VLAN and guest WLAN to be sure.

[1] https://hackaday.io/project/189632-e-ink-weather-station-pum...

[2] https://www.hackster.io/lmarzen/esp32-e-paper-weather-displa...

I did something similar with a first gen kindle. Some day it stopped working, I opened the enclosure to find a completely cracked-open kindle with a battery the size of a weather balloon inside.

This was about a month after I returned from a six week trip during which I kept that thing running.

Reminder that a lot of battery-powered devices really don't like to be connected to power all the time.

> Reminder that a lot of battery-powered devices really don't like to be connected to power all the time.

Shitty ones don't, yeah. A thing you can do with those is remove the battery fully, so it's not being recharged/used at all.

No you can't. That works for laptops but not phones, tablets etc.

Also they don't like being kept in hot enclosures without adequate ventilation / cooling.

That's not an issue for a device like this. The typical use case is refreshing the screen once every 5, 10, 15, etc. minutes, which takes a few seconds (including connecting to wifi, downloading the data, etc.), and then spend the rest of the time in some super low power deep sleep mode, drawing maybe tens of microamps. Or maybe checking over Bluetooth LE whether to trigger an update, once every couple seconds. This will never get hot enough to the point where it would matter.

OP said that they did this with a first-gen kindle, and I would not be surprised if it had an always-on wifi connection and was processing data much more frequently then you suggest. I agree that there are plenty of ways to build this in a power-efficient way, I just want to suggest that given modern battery controllers, heat is a much more likely cause of failure then keeping the kindle plugged in all the time.

Yea, to avoid this I run tbis device(kindle non-touch v4) unplugged and get 3 months on a charge with a fairly new battery.

use a light timer to help https://xkcd.com/1495/

An aside but I’ve long thought that if Apple was truly committed to the environment and equipment reuse they’d let us use old iPads for stuff like this. I’d love to make a digital photo frame/day planner from an old iPad mini I have kicking around. They could even integrate Siri etc.

(I know you can get some way toward this with various apps but it’s definitely not the same as something OS-level)

Why would Apple ever be "truly committed" to something which gives them less money? They have no reason to encourage people to use old technology.

They have by far the longest support historically compared to the rest of the ecosystem. It’s not even close. A while ago my parents bought an android device that SHIPPED one version behind and was never updated. Totally pathetic. I’ve seen fixes for surprisingly old iOS devices and even new features often go back some generations.

> Why would Apple ever be "truly committed" to something which gives them less money?

Because they claim to be!

I have an old ipad Mini running ios9. there is an app called liveframe and it has integrations with google photos. i have been running it as a picture frame for a couple of years now

My work does something like this with Surfaces and unfortunately if you leave devices like that plugged in all the time the batteries swell and bend the screen and frame.

Maybe they could soft lock them to 50% or something but under normal circumstances it's too dangerous.

Another option for displaying things on a jailbroken Kindle is to use kterm to ssh into a computer and then connect to a tmux session. I've used this to read man pages - it's quite satisfying to press 'f' on my laptop and see the page scroll on the Kindle.

Connectivity is easy, as you can connect over USB or WiFi (my Kindle connects to my iPhone's hotspot).

Keep it out of the sun. E-Ink does not like direct sunlight. I built a similar thing, more of central panel for all my home-grown cloud gadgets (because I hate backlit LCD), and after a summer of afternoon sun, half the panel died. Which was a bummer because it was a $300 panel.

Nice project.

I did something similar, but with photos. I managed to process everything on the device in 100% golang with imagemagick C-bindings.

As Imagemagick is also able to render text, it might be a solution for you to get rid of the need for an external server. The ARM build process happens on GitHub actions, so you can check it out.

https://github.com/landgenoot/kindle-synology-photos-photofr...

Cool, it looks like your processor is only slight newer then mind and is also on a 32 bit version of ARM so this approach would probably work. I'll keep this in mind for next time mine needs some work.

Really nice project.

The crispness of e-ink is 99% of what makes me want it for semi-static displays. It’s just ridiculously satisfying to look at.

More than any other piece of technology I own - phone, laptop, watch - my Kindle makes me happy. A big part of that is the display and it's paper-likeness.

I also love how simple it is. It’s a book of books. No distractions. It does what it does well. Waterproof. Battery lasts forever.

I’m getting into having more purpose-built gadgets even if they seem to 70% overlap with each other.

Reading a book on my phone or tablet just isn’t the same.

I just wish I could figure out a power scheme that would make it worth my trouble to use them as information radiators. Perhaps rechargeable batteries.

Displays like this would be a good candidate for wireless power schemes, but they aren’t sited in places with a good set of power scavenging options. Maybe solar.

I did kind of the same thing with a LilyGo display, and it looks amazing:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/

I had to turn it into a generic signage platform first (it lets you show any image you want), and then screenshot GCal onto that image. It works really well, though.

Nowadays it's an electronic power meter, which also looks great.

I didn't realise they made 4.7inch version. I find that a little small for my uses but you really did a lot with it. Nice project.

I made a solar powered conways game of life with an esp32 and a 4.2 waveshare display but the whole time I wanted a few more pixels.

I have a 7.3 inch, 7 color eink display coming in the mail. Built-in raspberry pico with wifi. Can't wait till it gets here... < 100 usd price, it sounds too good to be true.

Edit: can you believe it? https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-frame-7-3?variant=40...

I've been playing with one of those for the last month, made a little household dashboard thing: https://twitter.com/reillywood/status/1705373370215449033

The refresh time blows (something like 30 seconds), but otherwise I've been pretty happy with it.

I can recommend checking out https://openepaperlink.de/. It's a project to repurpose e-ink electronic shelf labels (in various sizes, ranging from 1.54" to 7.4"). I have been playing around with it the last few weeks and it's a lot of fun! The community around this is very active on Discord.

I use a Kindle Fire (non E-ink) tablet as a dedicated calendar viewing tool as:

1. It's very easy to put it into developer mode and set "don't lock screen if plugged in"

2. I can just open it to a web page of my calendar.

This is great as I don't get nerd-sniped into some dev project trying to set it all up and actually get a functional calendar so I don't miss things.

That's cool. I regret throwing my ancient kindle away now.

The expensive corporate version of this is called a Joan - https://getjoan.com/digital-signage/

Ooft. 900 euro and a subscription.

A more affordable alternative to this is the Inkplate series, which uses recycled e-ink screens from tablets: https://soldered.com/categories/inkplate/

The software runs on an ESP32 and is all open source: https://inkplate.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

It's affordable but some displays cost as much as waveshare displays, and waveshare displays are new, not refurbished/repurposed.

> I regret throwing my ancient kindle away now.

Amazon also gives you a 20% discount for buying a new one, if you send the old one in, even if it doesn’t work at all anymore.

I have just bought aranet4, a CO2 meter, which uses eink and I think partly because of that has a ridiculously long 5 year battery life.

But I understand why… it’s 169eur, the cheaper CO2 meters are just much cheaper.

Does this use the battery? Not clear to me if the Kindle program is running continuously or if it just periodically starts up, refreshes the screen and then powers back down.

I presume it does, but would only need charging once every couple of months. If it's going to be in a fixed position, e.g., on a desk, then it could just be left plugged in.

I've set up my own DIY version of this. It pulls a new image via a cron job and repaints the screen with it. I've not invested time looking into it but by default if the device sleeps, which it does very quickly after loosing wall power, the cron job will no longer run and the display gets stuck. You need to poke the power button to get it to wake again.

Instead of using a cronjob you can put the device into sleep and use the RTC to schedule the next wakeup (see [1]). This takes only very little power, as the device is only turned on for mere seconds and sleeps the remaining time.

[1] https://github.com/pascalw/kindle-dash/blob/main/src/dash.sh...

It goes into deep sleep and only wakes up once a day after midnight. It gets about 3 months on a charge.

I use to leave it plugged in but got sick of looking at the cord.

I have done something like this with my kindle. I then got kind of mad at myself for doing something so utilitarian. I wrote a little script to instead generate random wordle playthroughs, display that, be happy with the code... then immediately throw the kindle in my drawer.

Still, "generate a static image from a computer and send it to a display at a certain rate" is an underrated way to do fun things

There are many android eink reader out there the can be used easily for this scenario, why ppl are always bothered on kindle?

Kindle popularity I'd imagine. I've got an old kindle knocking around somewhere, I'd rather reuse that than buy a new device to tinker with

Recently went the DIY route to show a Notion board on my 4th gen kindle. This is much nicer though, as it's optimised for display on the lower resolution screen.

I just wanted to avoid having to pull data out of Notion & re-build a UI. Would be nice for some way to apply CSS to a page to make it more viewable.

Still dreaming of the day when we can have E Ink Dice

I've been using a magnetic pad (https://www.plus-vision.com/jp/product/kaite/) that works on the same principles of eink, except using magnets rather than electric fields. There's many variants available on aliexpress now. The only con is that stray magnets like on computers will wipe the pad if placed too close together.

Very cool. I’d been thinking about building something like this. Do you look at it every day? Seems really useful.

Nice, I literally just started to build something similar on a waveshare and raspi!

All I want for Christmas is for eink displays to be as cheap as commodity LCDs.

It won't happen until e-ink gets a similar scale of production - E-Ink is niche, because it's basically never better than LCDs and is more expensive, so it's only used in e-readers, supermarket tags, and nowadays e-notes, all of which are incredibly niche. This might change if E-Ink corp's fast multi-dye color tech ACeP/Gallery 3) takes off in a big way, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

I would really buy a generally available ready to hack e-ink display product

Hi OP!

You're writing

> I use FBInk on the kindle to display the images after curling them from a API Gateway.

I am the founder of this smart screen product: https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...

Curling an image is the same approach that I use for my e-paper smart screen as well. It should be quite easy to bring your dashboard to my device... maybe we can work together on something? My email is info@invisible-computers.com

This looks really neat! Does it have an ethernet port? And maybe PoE?

It's powered by a USB plug... is there a way to convert PoE to USB power?

And the connectivity is through Wifi. (And Bluetooth during Setup)

The PoE to USB solution is a "PoE splitter" and they're cheap and very useful. The website says the device has a USB-A connector for power. That's a bit of an odd connector to power a device from (since A is supposed to be a host port). Is that port really an A?

I am referring to something like this: https://www.newnex.com/images/usb-2-a-male(UH2-AE)_small.png

Isn't this called a USB-A plug?

EDIT: I cannot respond to the child comment, but yes: The Device has a male USB plug, and then the cable goes right into the device, no receptacle on the device.

I think I'm misunderstanding. The device has a captive cable with a USB-A plug on the end (i.e. not a female receptacle on the device), doesn't it?

Edit: I understand. I'm used to devices with receptacles rather than captive cables. Any reason why you went that way?

I was going back and forth on this for a long time, but ultimately I decided that a cable entering the device looks sleeker than a plug that is plugged into a socket on the frame.

Also makes it easier to place it on the included stand.

For sure, there are tons of off the shelve adapters that'll do it. But may be hard to fit in your package.

The big part, is the power is delivered at a pretty high voltage, so you are going to need a buck converter to get it down to the 5V usb expects.

Very nice. You've made a beautiful looking device. I'll be in touch.

Cool!

Is there documentation on how the custom content can be rendered on this?

Hmm, what do you have in mind?

Some custom content just for yourself, or an app that others can install as well?

Why are you evading the question? The answer should be a simple "yes, I allow you to pull or push content using the following methods:"

I can buy an ESP32 e-ink screen and run esphome or any of several other open source projects and put a piece of wood on the front of it, too.

I was trying to understand your question better. There are two ways to build software for it:

One: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

Two:

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

Both of these require rendering the content via an HTTP endpoint and both of these currently only work together with the device backend.

> I can buy an ESP32 e-ink screen and run esphome or any of several other open source projects and put a piece of wood on the front of it, too.

Yes, you can! And if you do this, you have absolutely no need to use my e-paper smart screen. (Though, for the record, it's not just a piece of wood in front, it's a CNC'd frame)

I bought one of your devices after seeing you on HN a month or two ago; after nearly 3 weeks of DHL doing god-alone-knows-what, it finally arrived and I can say it's super well built.

Thanks Corey! There are always things I want to improve of course :)

I want to be fair to DHL here: The parcels are shipped through the letter network to make the overseas shipping more affordable. It's expected that they take bit longer than the normal DHL packages.

I like how you submarine each e-ink HN post :)

Guilty as charged.

Why do you proxy eveything through your api backend? Can the device not check the url directly? Also, does the checking result in full image download always or do you respect etags and other caching headers like if-modified-since?

> Why do you proxy eveything through your api backend Because it makes development and maintenance soo much easier, faster and reliable. I don't have to debug stuff that breaks on somebody's embedded esp32. If something breaks, it's in the backend and I see it in Sentry.

> Can the device not check the url directly

Yes, it could (with some modifications). But then you need to transmit and store the URL on the device, which requires establishing a bluetooth connection to change it. I am considering to offer this as an option to give myself and other peace of mind.

> Do you respect etags and other caching headers like if-modified-since

Not yet, but I could implement this very quickly if you send me an email and tell me you need this. :) (This is a great example how proxying things though the backend makes development easier: If I wasn't proxying, this change would require a firmware update.)

Instead of having your backend download and retransmit the file, you could return a redirect to it instead? Plus maybe lower the poll rate from a few times per minute to once an hour or so to avoid the need for caching to save battery.

I could do a redirect (it would require a small firmware update)

But that would still expose your authentication credentials to the backend, so a malicious backend could MITM you.

Reducing the polling is definitely an option, I want to make that configurable very soon.

Btw, the cached data in the backend is encrypted with a token that is only transmitted from the device to the backend during the API request of the device. It's not end-to-end, but it's a step.

If you can provide a script that takes in an HTML file and provides an image ready for rendering, that would be amazing. Then I can automatically take any website and have a cron job that dumps the result into a shared dropbox link where it can be used by the screen.

> If you can provide a script that takes in an HTML file and provides an image ready for rendering, that would be amazing.

Yea, that's something I have been trying to build, but it's surprisingly non-trivial. There are a bunch of headless browser options, but I haven't found a good way to tell them: "Render the page in X width and Y height and then take a screenshot".

That seems like a problem that should have 100 open source solutions for it, and I am sure there are some that work really well! But I personally haven't found one yet.

It feels fairly reasonable imo to specify something like "this uses phantomjs with the following screen size" and just say peoples work has to fit that.

> "Render the page in X width and Y height and then take a screenshot".

Isn't this the exact example of phantomjs?

``` page.viewportSize = { width: 600, height: 600 }; ```

At least that is what I use to do for screen testing for some of our low-hanging-fruit QA. At some point I rewrote it in puppeteer and it was as simple as the above line.

The screenshot results in being the X/Y size.

I'd be interested in why this doesn't work in your usecase.

I made something almost exactly like this before. I needed to convert svgs to pngs and have them display the same way they looked in the browser. It turned out that spinning up chromium and taking a screenshot was the easiest thing way to do that. I think I used puppeteer.

Headless Chrome seems like it should be able to do what you want pretty easily. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/headless-chrome/

Hi! A while ago I had exactly the same problem and thought process, so I made this: https://github.com/SmilyOrg/website-image-proxy

Hopefully you find it useful :)

I would love to use your product, but there is certain data I can't send through a remote proxy (like my work calendar). Is there anyway to run whatever the backend is locally on a machine on my network? Or to have the device pull from a custom URL that is local to my network instead?

This isn't possible yet. I want to add as an option that in the future, but it's not possible yet. Sorry :(

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