Hacking eInk Price Tags (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Hacking eInk Price Tags (2021)

dmitry.gr

127 pointsmnem25 comments

I've been sitting on the idea of putting several of these tags around the house and have them display quote, jokes, and facts.

The best guide I've found so far is this one [0], as it uses easy to procure tags + guides on GitHub + offers an application to auto-upate tags via screenshot area of a website and seems like it could be done in an afternoon.

However, I'm hoping to find an even more streamlined approach that I could turn into a gift to others (assuming they want a 3rd party device on their network), where the tags sync to a raspberry pi (or similar cheap USB powered device), and it uses very cheap tags, if anyone has done this or has plans.

[0] https://youtu.be/BCkMu57S_YA?si=BsSXEladdZHvcC57

Does he mention a price or part number at some point? I'm quite a good way in, and he hasn't mentioned anything, and the description is empty.

EDIT: I see the description now, they're called Hanshow Stellar and sell for $20-$25 a piece. Not the price point I thought of when I heard "cheap", but eh.

Most people I know who have played with them just picked ‘em up at their local Walmart…

Hm, how much do they sell there for?

Five fingers

This might be the only time I felt like this video was ever going to be related to anything

https://youtu.be/hJ9yBgTp9UQ?si=ouX6-9_L4hXoFWvE

Good read but I have one question: What’s the address of the chinese documents site he is talking about?

pudn

How did this get downvoted? I am the author of the original article and that IS the site I meant!!!

Oooh! Just left a top-level comment but I thought I'd reiterate somewhere you might see it - this is a stellar writeup. It's a rare pleasure to find such a technically comprehensive breakdown of embedded firmware on HN.

8051 is the cockroach of embedded systems. Bizarrely resilient, and absolutely disgusting. My very first firmware job (erm, internship) was taking a Cortex-M0+ and making it serve as a pin-for-pin replacement for an 8051. Many crimes against software humanity were committed.

I found this a couple months ago and it was an amazing resource (thanks dmitrygr)!

I ended up using atc1441's base station firmware[0] because it's a bit of a pain to actually pop open the case and get the programming pins on the Chroma 74

[0]https://github.com/atc1441/E-Paper_Pricetags

Bookmarked for future reference! Awesome work.

Furrtek has been playing with those things too. Maybe he knows things you don't and vice versa. https://github.com/furrtek/PrecIR

Perhaps relevant - https://github.com/OpenEPaperLink/OpenEPaperLink

I wish there was a self-contained e-ink 10 inch screen that would just sit on my network and accept URLs to display in sequence. Possibly with an equivalent to a Raspberry Pi 3 to SSH into.

You could take a look at a project I recently made, it’s very easy to put together and run a server to do what you want!

https://github.com/blixt/sol-mate-eink

I have one of these which is basically what you describe. Marketing materials focus on the Google calendar integration but you can also feed it images via a URL which it polls regularly.

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

You can get a kindle to display a self-refreshing webpage in the browser. Only issue is keeping it awake somehow.

https://soldered.com/product/inkplate-10-9-7-e-paper-board-c... You can do that with this.

can vouch for this one - i use it in a few places

I followed this guide and was able to do almost exactly that: https://matthealy.com/kindle

This is one of the best firmware-related technical writeups I've ever read on HN. The author doesn't overstate the nightmare that is 8051. I can personally vouch for its horribleness, and its cockroach-like persistence.

As a hobby photographer who mostly shoots black-and-white film, readily available info about generating grayscale images on eInk displays is intriguing from an artistic perspective.

TL;DR: It does run DOOM :)

A "Carmack Complete" system as I've started calling them.

"Carmack Complete", that's a good one :)

PS. For the record, this thread is now in the top SEO results for "Carmack Complete" ...

... so, theres's that :)

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