I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper
mfasold.net
mfasold.net
Most of us on HN can be grateful for having been able to fully develop our faculties in an age where instant dopamine shots weren't available 24/7.
Looking at kids growing up now and stories from teachers in classrooms it's dystopic IMO. A 1/3 of teachers' time spent battling for attention against TikTok. Teenagers sitting together and not giving each other proper attention because of constant interrupts from Snapchat. No room for boredness-initiated creativity in the lives whatsoever.
I don't think Soma from Brave New World was all that far off from what's happening with smartphones.
I hope we're at the top of the curve now though, at least in Norway phone use in education and social settings is seen more and more like smoking and more and more parents at least try to delay the introduction of screens for as long as they can. And (some) high schools are finally imposing PROPER bans against smartphones during class (i.e. confiscation rather than "I promise not to use it" which simply doesn't work). It's a hard long battle at this point though; made harder by adult techno-optimists (most of whom I can only assume probably haven't properly seen teenagers these days in action)
Why are phones allowed in the classroom? When I was in school, if you were caught looking at your phone in class, or if the phone made a noise from your pocket/bag, it would instantly be confiscated - no second chances.
If phones are causing problems in school, maybe the school could try establishing some basic standards of behaviour and discipline? How is this difficult?
I think the issue might be that in Norway the teachers would not be allowed to confiscate the phone; concerns about school being liable if device is damaged etc.
This autumn luckily the Norwegian government FINALLY, very long overdue, made it clear phones should not be allowed. In the school where my wife teaches this made a night and day difference as they started requiring the use of a "phone hotel" during class. But in other schools they for some reason do not.
When did that change?! A shame.
I wasn't disrupting class or distracting myself at all. This was on a dumb phone, taking a call from a parent. I argued against the detention and was told that my school had a "zero tolerance" policy for cell phone use under any circumstances, just like weapons.
What changed?
The only one who has given up are the parents and teachers on setting proper boundaries to children because most likely they themselves are addicted.
It makes DARE from the 90s feel even more surreal than it already did when I lived through it as a student. Kids, don't do drugs, but it is okay to become dependent on technology.
Arduino code and APIs are also really badly designed, and badly documented. The Inkplate uses an Xtensa ESP32 so the network code uses this crap:
https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/blob/2.0.17/libra...
Does `int read();` block? Zero comments so you'll have to read the code, which by the way is very hard to find because of course intellisense doesn't work in the gimped VSCode that Arduino is calling their IDE (it's better than the old one at least, though it wouldn't take much).
The really frustrating thing is that Arduino has basically zero competition. I was hopeful for Mbed Studio for a while but they spent so long fucking it up with web based compilers, terrible home-brewed build systems (yotta? I think they went through several bad attempts), before finally doing the right thing (Mbed Studio) that I think everyone had given up waiting and they killed the whole project. Also it's obviously ARM only.
And I can't see that really changing. I think there's PlatformIO but I think that just wraps the Arduino code in less awfulness. As long as hardware manufacturers are writing their drivers and examples for Arduino it's going to be hard for anyone else to compete.
Ok I think my one-line change has finished compiling now...
/rant
The IDE tooling is terrible/frustrating for pros in many ways, but "it just works" in some other very important ways. You can get to hello-world (blink an LED) in under 5 minutes. That's huge and appears to be more of what Arduino is targeting.
It could "just work" AND have a good API, proper build system, proper IDE, etc.
That's what ARM were (very slowly) heading towards with Mbed Studio before they canned it.
In any event, you don't HAVE to use the Arduino software. If you hate it so much, stop using it! The Arduino software just wraps existing open source "normal" MCU toolchains, you can use those directly instead.
No I haven't. This kind of "but it's for beginners!!" argument is nonsense on two fronts:
1. Just because it's for beginners doesn't give it an excuse to be bad. Why doesn't incremental compilation work? Why doesn't it have a proper build system? Why is the API so awful? You can fix all those without hurting beginner friendliness - in fact fixing those would make it more beginner friendly.
2. The fact that it is soooo popular means that there isn't a good alternative "pro" option anyway, so I am more or less forced to use the "for beginners but terrible" Arduino because it's what everyone else does. Why shouldn't people who know what they're doing be able to use Arduino?
What the pros actually do is use the vendor-specific SDKs, but those have their own big downsides (namely they're vendor specific).
Don't make excuses for it.
If you turn on verbose logging in the IDE the logs will show the actual commands it is using to invoke gcc which is handy to figure out locations and flags needed for the various commands.
The verbose IDE log should also show the command line tool (probably avrdude) that is used to download the binary to your Arduino.
This classroom timetable shows the utility of that, and it’s not so hard to imagine it extending to other interactive or non-interactive uses (meeting room reservation, digital store pricing, bus timetables, etc.).
And it’s no coincidence that the first product is an epaper calendar :D
This got me curious about small eInk labels that we could set up some API webhook to refresh. Turns out there's not really any out of the box solutions to do this.
If someone is looking for something similar with less hassle, let me plug my friend’s product :) https://www.inklay.app/ I’ve been using it for the better part of a year now to show the weather, a dashboard and some comics and am very happy with it, it just works and looks great too
> Shipping to Switzerland only
which is a shame :/
Does the kid have to memorise this in the morning so he knows why rooms to go to?
I don't even think my parents were aware of my school timetable. Why would they be? That was my business. It seems a bit weird to me that parents get involved to such an extent.
As a teen this was great because sometimes you could stay in bed longer, be out earlier and not having to carry the extra books (not sure if that still is a problem now).
edit: I just remember we even had call trees to call your classmates in the morning if classes got canceled. This was before the internet, making it not 15 years ago but at least 20, probably more. I'm getting old...
As for cancelled lessons, I wish! That never happened. We had a substitute teacher every time. But the substitute came to the room we were already scheduled to be in.
The only reasons I can think for making the kids change is if there's a problem with the room itself or if the teachers are not interchangeable between rooms. But I would have thought teachers would find room changes easier now than back then, if anything (given the use of ubiquitous technology like projectors etc.).
it's like train timetables, you know. yes, they're meant to be the same every day, but you'd be a fool not to check the updates before you go. that's just how it is in a large chaotic system.
* Skylight: https://www.skylightframe.com
* Hearth: https://hearthdisplay.com
* Cozyla: https://www.cozyla.com/
* DAK Board: https://dakboard.com
* MagicMirror: https://magicmirror.builders/
* Mango Display: https://mangodisplay.com/
* Echo Show 21: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDWWS127
It's a neat project though. I wasn't aware Soldered existed so this is a nice find.
I'm not sure that was much better than just telling the students in advance when you know a schedule will change and sending them to the library to study or etc.
If this is your blog please add "Show HN: " to the title here.
> you've made something that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. [1]
but afaik nothing in the guidelines [2] requires it.
Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance). It's hardly comparable.
As for this project, I'm not sure how wise it is to build something that relies on scraping some unknown third party website when it comes to school schedules. I'd risk it for my own schedule, but if your scraper makes a mistake you'll get your kid in trouble. Maybe the teacher will believe "it's because my parents made this scheduling contraption" as an excuse, but they'll only accept it once or twice if they do. If there's any app I'd completely unlock in parental controls, it's this one, because it only seems to do the bare minimum anyway.
Of course I will take full responsibility in case of bugs... So far it didn't happen.
While I'd be more conservative in the setup (I'd probably go with a device without inputs that turns on just to browse to a website directly, making any browsing mistakes or changed layouts less impactful), I do wish there were better alternatives for parents than "hand your kid a smartphone".
In an ideal world, schools would use some kind of one-way messaging devices to get the benefits of modern technology without the addiction smartphones bring, but I don't think we'll see that any time soon. Perhaps something like a (locked-down) Remarkable e-Ink tablet with a cellular network connection to receive school notifications and schedule updates as well as for doing homework in could prove quite useful, but that also sounds way too expensive for schools at the moment and you'd need to lock it down so that it's no more distracting than a piece of paper.
> Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance).
That seems like a really odd way of handling it, and more confusing than it needs to be. For me the class was assigned to a specific room, not the teacher - so it never moved. If we had a substitute, they'd just be in the normal room instead of the usual teacher. If they couldn't get one in time, then either an administrator would bring us to study hall (highschool) or after 10 minutes we'd just leave assuming they couldn't make it (college).
"Solution": class X, Y, and Z all meet in Lunchroom W on Wednesday so one adult can supervise all of them.
Generally, a teacher not showing up was no real reason for skipping class (no matter how much urban myths said otherwise) but if the absence was known in advance we'd get a free hour. Most kids used those for some extra homework time or to just hang out, unless the free hour lined up with the start or the end of the day.
We didn't really have study hall, just the normal areas in school that you'd also hang out in during breaks (or holes in the schedule, as older kids with personal schedules occasionally had).
In university this rarely happened, most people would leave after about 30 minutes because a lot of them traveled half an hour or more to get there in the first place. People were a lot less willing to abandon classes once they were paying out of their own pocket for them.
Having a digital schedule almost gives the school the ability to be more relaxed with the schedule, as opposed to it being built around a schedule that can hardly move. There is an important part of school which is revolved around routine. I remember it only took a few weeks in the first term before I'd be walking to classed without needing to read the timetable at all.
It's inevitable that we end up moving down this route, but lets not forget the old solution worked just fine and meant you needed a pretty good reason to change the timetable.
If you can't find enough substitutes, pay them more instead of spending money on apps to rearrange schedules.
While in general I'm a fan of "learn how to do things by hand for didactic value" (e.g. learning how to do long division before using the calculator to do it), I don't think a paper planner provides any didactic value to learn before replacing it with an electronic calendaring tool.
yeah, they’ve been for a while
I constantly would forget it at school. It would get lost at home. If the teacher wasn't reminding us about long running projects from weeks ago it would just be forgotten since I wasn't looking that far back.
Then I got to college and someone showed me that they put their assignments in their Google calendar and told me I could set up alerts in my email and later my phone. There were never any forgotten assignments ever again. Paper planners are provably worthless to me.
Some kids have zero interaction with pen and paper for at least some homeworks, where they'll receive the assignment in a class group, do it on the tablet, send it back there as a PDF, and get back an annotated PDF with the corrections.
Not all schools are doing all of that. Some schools are though, and most seem to have implemented some subset.
While doing this, the kids are not necessarily taught the basics of what's going on on their devices. They tend to not know the difference between, say: a browser and a search engine; a window and a tab; a menu and a tool bar; an operating system and a desktop environment [1].
Source: students of mine, telling me about their schools and how things work.
[0] if there is a textbook. It could just be PDFs of lessons, which could be all from one source or various sources.
[1] until I keep pestering them until they start to see a bit clearer, even though we're not doing computer subjects :)
I didn't mean in the first message simply knowing the difference between tabs and windows and a few other GUI bits and bobs, those were meant to be an example of a larger point. The larger point being the notion that it's fun and possible to be a combative, pro-active, "liberated" computer user.
The empowerment of computer users is diametrically opposed however to the interests of Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, Amazon, etc etc. The ideal computer user for them is one who knows nothing, except exactly what they need to know to keep clicking, commenting, sharing, liking, spewing out their personal details, and fishing out the credit and debit cards.
No need to understand where the data goes, where it is stored, who owns it, what they know about you and what is shared with third parties, what is costs to provide such a service (even though none of its users seem to pay anything), how it is monetized, how dark UI patterns nudge you, how algorithms manipulate you, why you can get addicted to them.
Just click on the friendly little coloured rectangle with the rounded corners. That's the app. That's all you need to know.
That’s the exact amount knowledge most users want.
Back when I was young I was completely astonished by that mindset... but now that I'm older, I kinda get it. When you gotta juggle 8 hours of work, 2 hours of commute, 1-2 hours of chores, and completely forget about kids or a sane sleep schedule... you don't have the time dealing with bullshit, you need something that works. And you got money to pay for that, too.
When i was getting a new computer to my father in law the main requirement was that it would be hard for him to do stupid stuff, like install a virus, so we went with a mac. It makes a lot of sense for him to use a very limited device because all he does is browse, watch youtube and listen to music, why does he have to understand all the details of how all of this works at all?
Systems evolve until they reach the maturity of elevators. Press the button, it goes to your floor. Some users might wish they could change the button LED color, make it blink to the elevator music's rhythm and swap the scheduling algorithm on the fly with their custom choice... I guess they are all here !
For most people computers are like cars, they couldn't care less about how they work, as long as they can use them to take them from place A to place B.
Different strokes for different folks, but never forget, knowledge is power.
In more practical terms, this extended to things like not understanding why an Acorn-formatted floppy disk, or Doom for Windows, couldn't be read by a Mac.
Naturally, another memory of those days was my dad complaining that "these days" people couldn't understand the electrical circuits because everything was getting replaced with ICs where the only thing you could do if it failed was throw the entire chip away and replace it.
Quite neat, indeed.
I was thinking this would make a good display for Home Assistant, and what do you know, someone has built a HA integration for it[1].
This lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole - it's using a "screensaver" set up for the Kindle[2], which also lead me into the info about jailbreaking Kindles.
This adds some projects for over the coming break.
[1] https://github.com/lanrat/homeplate [2] https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver
Fast forward a few years and my daughter has 2 different lessons per day, it's communicated with an app and she has to look at it at least twice a week after half a year to figure what day what was.
The best thing ever to only have two subjects per day so you can actually concentrate on the subjects and not try and fail at multitasking the whole time...
A sentiment I’ve heard a lot is “how will kids learn the value of money in a cashless society”. The answer, like with the paper planner is “unfortunately the world has changed”. Using a paper calendar or cash isn’t obsolete, but the real trick is learning to schedule/work with money. And in the modern day, you _must_ be able to do this digitally. All my biggest incomes and expenses are digital transactions - my salary, mortgage, insurance, energy bills. Learning to manage cash flow means understanding it in that context.
Scheduling is the same now. If you operate solely on a paper planner in thr modern world you’re going to miss out. My workplace is entirely digital, my golf course, gym, even my barber use digital calendars. I’m not saying a proprietary app is the right move, but a paper scheduler is unfortunately bordering on obsolete.
For what it's worth, I've been in the software field for decades - long enough that I prefer not to use it. My preferred barber loses my business because he only accepts appointments via his app. I'm not installing it, so I cut my hair somewhere else. He knows this, and he's busy enough that the loss of a single old customer isn't compelling enough to get him to waste his time scheduling appointments by phone.
Or was cash just a convenient low-risk mechanism because the pocket money parents give to their kids is in small enough units that they can afford for their kids to waste it or straight up lose it?
If the latter, I suspect even games with internal currencies would provide the same learning opportunities. And I don't mean micro-transactions here, I mean like the SimCity (2000 in particular) or Civilization games where your actions within the game are what makes or consumes the currency.
But it could also be, say, €$£5/week of vouchers for Steam or Amazon or whatever.
(I'm like you when it comes to having been in software too long, and therefore not wanting to install apps for everything).
They’re good building blocks but they’re not enough.
Learning to protect and not lose a wallet, or to count change… seems like exactly the kind of thing that no longer matters, as we move to more digital money everywhere. What change, what wallet?
Outside those points: multiplayer games with currencies in them simulate all of the rest, and even single player games simulate some of those things.
But, that's how the world works. What major bills are you paying that you pay c cash for in the last decade? All the more reason to teach kids to operate in this way.
And I actually have been going back to cash more often, and I spend noticeably less when I do. And I’m an engineer who loves spreadsheets, so I’m guessing it causes most people bigger spending issues.
I don't get it. Why is he checking his kids' school timetable in the morning? My parents never needed to know my precise timetable for the day. They just dropped me off at school and picked me up again in the morning.
Why is this complicated?
But then you realize that we're talking about Germany here, and before you downvote, trust me, anyone who has lived there for a while and especially if they had to deal with public administration will attest that it's a country that's literally 10 to 20 years behind in everything digital. You wouldn't expect it given Germany's engineering reputation, but improving citizen's lives through IT has never been their forte.
When we lived there for some years, the school my kids went to had four(!) different parallel channels of communication in the class that one of my kids attended at the time. That is, you could potentially receive a message, say, from the teacher through one of four different means, and so you were expected to monitor these channels every day. Some of them were apps, some of them were paper. It was a mess. Simply doing nothing digitally and only using paper slips would have been an improvement already.
So instead let me:
1. take a screenshot of the website
2. Change the styling of the website as the screenshot is being taken
3. Modify the image using headless Inkscape
4. Serve the image on a web-server
I'm in the same situation as you and this is what my daughter's school uses.
Edit: ahh, I see you are also in Leipzig! :)
This was a neat project, but I feel like this is insanely overkill for a solution that is “whitelist the app required for school”.
I sort of feel bad for this kid.
I mean, I graduated high school in 15+ years ago and we had a website that we had to regularly check for assignments and project updates and things. It was a requirement of school. I know these types of sites are even more integral process wise, now a days.
Having a parent that’s such an engineer, that they impose such odd restrictions on phone use (even for a school site), sounds not fun.
Do you yourself have or teach teenage kids these days? It's a bit like all kids are brought up on heroine -- everyone addicted to doomscrolling/TikTok, teachers spend all their time trying to get attention. Phones and social media have quite drastically altered the reality the kids grow up in in a quite unhealthy way. It's dystopic IMO.
Most of us on HN can be grateful for having been able to fully develop our faculties in an age where instant dopamine shots weren't available 24/7.
We've given him instructions, consequences, rules, expectations, strategies, time-boxing, support, and therapy. He still CANNOT have free access to an internet-connected screen or he will end up on some video site and doom-scroll tiktok videos and the like to the exclusion of everything else that is going on or what he SHOULD be using the device for. EVERY single time. Even if we tell him he's not allowed on those sites. If we give him even a little bit for a while, he'll throw a violent and long-lasting temper tantrum when we say it's time to be done with them. And again the next time we say no. Those short-form reels/shorts/whatever seem to have all the same properties of narcotics on his brain.
The ONLY thing that works is giving him free access only to devices with limited functionality. He can watch DVDs on the TV, he can play Wii, he can play thousands of games on his retro handheld gaming console. He is fine with those things and can easily self-moderate with those. He'll do those for a while and then eventually be done with them and go outside and play, or build something out of lego. That would NEVER happen if he was allowed access to a device that he can doom-scroll on.
I think we need to acknowledge that while today's digital consumption experiences are generally unhealthy for nearly everyone, there are some non-neurotypical minds that are absolutely defenseless against it.
And IIUC it is the same with narcotics/alcohol/nicotine: Not everyone are equally affected by them, consequence wise and/or addiction wise, whether due to genetics or social or economic status. In those cases we use the law to regulate to protect the ones most suspectible.
That wasn't the case when these things were brand new.
In some years social media might be regulated in the way alcohol and smoking is (as Australia already did). But right now it is just the tiny beginnings of getting acceptance that parents ought to regulate their kids on this issue and that this is OK and a good thing.