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Comment by philips | Hacker News Reader

> Most IoT products support SSH-ing directly into peripheral devices. We've heard too many horror stories about how this can go wrong, and decided to invert the paradigm.

> Your TRMNL device pings our server, never the other way around.

> Each request made to our /api/display endpoint includes only the minimum details needed to support customers -- an API key, device mac address, firmware version, battery voltage, and wifi signal strength.

Super hackable but it pings their hosted server and nothing else?! Is there a way to run your own server?

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we're adding more docs on running your own server soon, which will include 1-click deploy starter projects that Just Work.

if you think about it, we are incentivized to do this. no subscription fees means the more you ping our server, the lower our margin. but for now we're wrapping up fulfilling all pre-orders, scaling, etc typical new product issues.

even without BYOS (bring your own server) docs however, it's already possible to point TRMNL to your own stack if you 1) fork our OSS firmware + b) have some experience with e-ink.

Can you clarify what the difference between the Developer Edition and normal edition are? It's not clear from the checkout flow if this is required in order to create plugins, and is not mentioned anywhere in the docs.

hardware is the same, Developer edition vs Regular is a permission-only change that lets you build custom plugins and a few other things.

brief post here outlining more of the benefits: https://usetrmnl.com/blog/developer-edition

need to update docs too, thanks for the call out. we were writing docs before this piece was ironed out.

OK, thank you for the reply. The product looks great. I will roll the dice seeing the OSS firmware. Thanks!

appreciate your support!

The docs aren't super encouraging either. https://docs.usetrmnl.com/go/diy/byod-s

> Purchase a TRMNL from our home page: https://usetrmnl.com

> Then follow the instructions on BYOD/S > Server.

> More TBD.

They seem to have the api base url hardcoded in their firmware[1]. The repo seems to have pretty clear instructions for compiling and flashing modified firmware. From there, it's just a matter of writing a decent server to implement the calls documented in BYOD/S[2] and Private API.[3]

[1]: https://github.com/usetrmnl/firmware/blob/e3db8c37990c2333ec...

[2]: https://docs.usetrmnl.com/go/diy/byod-s

[3]: https://docs.usetrmnl.com/go/private-api/introduction

Nice, thank you for investigating.

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