Comment by Dyac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dyac | Hacker News Reader

Hi. I have wanted something like this for YEARS, but have never had the motivation to hack something together.

A few questions:

1. Is the dev edition hardware different?

2. If not, it possible to upgrade to a dev edition later, ie. Is it just a config thing on the server end?

3. If I have multiple trmnls how do I manage them? Is it possible? Do I need multiple accounts? Do they show the same stuff etc? Is "dev edition" for my account or per-device?

4. Using multiple apps - is it a split screen display, or do it cycle through the apps every x seconds? Is there a button to advance to the next one?

5. What's the resolution in real terms? Ie. Can I get a full month calendar to show and still be able to read entries? How many lines of Todo-list items can I have? What happens to over-flowed items?

6. how does it get updates? does it connect to my phone via Bluetooth or to my WiFi? Can it store multiple WiFi networks, for if I want to take it places?

so glad to hear this.

1/2. hardware is the same, just a permissions switch. you can upgrade any time in-app.

3. one account can manage them all, there is a device switcher in top corner that makes it easy to jump between playlists, content orderings, preferences etc. you can also “mirror” a device like child<>parent but they are independent by default. dev edition currently device specific but if you say “hey not cool” we can bump both your devices on the same account. ;)

4. yes and yes and yes. you can choose from several layouts (full screen, split, 3-way split etc) and you configure refresh intervals per device, per plugin, per time of day. so maybe you want calendar only from 8-9a, or reddit / hn only in the evening. there is a skip btn on the device which can also be double-clicked to do other stuff (go backwards, email me this, etc).

5. res is 800x480. not amazing but we make it work. built our own design system with special fonts. preview: https://usetrmnl.com/framework. yes we have calendar in Month view and it looks fine IMO. you can fit in /read a lot of text. for overflow we have some JS magic that auto truncates and you can control these params as well. see “Overflow” section in Framework docs above.

6. connects via wifi, yes supports multiple SSID, and receives OTA updates automatically (which you can disable). firmware is open source as well.

hope to see you on the inside!

Ryan

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