The Unbrickable Pledge
usetrmnl.com
usetrmnl.com
Give me wifi, e-ink display, and the ability to write a regular program that writes unicode chracters to STDOUT (and have that rendered to the display) and I'll give you my money right now. All it needs is a plain-old Linux TTY driver for the e-ink display (so you can set the fonts as you would in Linux). Then all you need for e-reading is a plain text file, the column tool for formatting, and the less pager for paging.
In terms of output more complex than text, there's this program dialog that takes command-line input and renders a UI in a console. That exact same thing, except rendering directly to the e-ink display, would work fine for 90% of e-ink apps. It could handle rendering fonts, styles, images, layouts, buttons, etc. Anyone who can learn basic scripting and use unix command-line tools could then make their own e-ink apps, and run them on the tablet, with absurdly low resource use.
you don't need to host per se, however. you can deploy one of our BYOS options on a local network and let your device(s) ping 192.168/api/display. just about zero config required, just docker up and input your local network domain into the FW > captive portal UI during setup.
For what TRMNL is it seems like a smart decision to me. I know CPU grunt is dirt cheap these days but you’d never get the battery life that you are if you put more smarts on the device. You’ve clearly optimized for something very useful.
I got mine a little over a week ago, I’ve been enjoying it so far. I was messing around with my settings tonight when I found your post and I thought it would do well here.
I love the idea that even if something happens I can keep mine going easily.
However I can see many benefits of this, particularly running without a power connection and have ordered. Hurry up with the next batch!
Comes pre-installed with a Debian-based distro. It's basically a regular computer in an e-ink tablet form-factor. You can use whatever language and whatever toolkit you want to make your apps. `dialog` works. VT-switching (Ctrl-Alt-F<n>) works.
It's got its issues. For example, the preinstalled virtual keyboard feels kind of unusable. Keypresses sometimes don't register if you don't hold them for long enough, and they sometimes don't register if you hold them too long, because then it opens up a menu for look-alike characters. wvkbd (another virtual keyboard) works much better, but it's not compatible with the preinstalled wayland compositor, so you'd need to switch to sway or something, which is perfectly doable.
Anyway, as the product page says, it's kinda beta-phase, but I'm personally satisfied with my purchase.
And if you don't want to build an app, they all have web browsers. Generate some HTML on a server, point the eink browser at the page, done.
2. Requires network connectivity.
I would like to imagine an e-ink operating system like what Kindle has: a hardware off by default mode, unless a physical button press is given. It wakes instantly, does its job, as complicated as needed, and then goes right back to hard off until the next wake.
Network connectivity isn’t required, you can do this in adb.
Battery: sure, running android means you’re not getting the life you would see on a Kindle, but it’s significantly better than a traditional tablet.
This is what I think of as simple:
$ result="$(
dialog --radiolist "Pick a card" 0 0 0 \
"Six of hearts" 1 "on" \
"Nine of clubs" 2 "off" \
"Ace of spades" 3 "off" \
)"
$
$ if [ "$result" = "3" ] ; then
dialog --msgbox "I love Motörhead too!" 0 0
fi
$
Give me the equivalent of a 486DX2 with 16MB of RAM, a simple TTY, and a program that renders dialog boxes directly to video memory, and I can do everything I'll ever need to [with a small e-ink screen]. Save the fancy stuff for tablets and laptops.
I bought an Inkplate 10 from eBay for like £80, which is an absolute bargain. 10" display, ESP-32. You do have to buy a battery but they're cheap and available and it has the charging circuits built in.
The only real downsides I've found are:
1. No case. I don't want an ugly 3D printed one so I ended up buying a custom sized picture frame online (£17 I think), and mounting it in that.
2. The software is Arduino based. Arduino is trash, but I don't want to have to figure out how to set up something sane like PlatformIO or Rust, so I've opted to put as little software on it as possible. All it does is download an image, display it, and then go to sleep for however long the server says. I even made a simple custom image format so I didn't have to deal with PNG or whatever.
Yes it is. Code quality is abysmal. There's no CLI interface to their build system so you have to use their gimped editor. It doesn't even support incremental compilation, which means a one-line change takes like 5 minutes to deploy while it rebuilds SSL libraries etc. every single time.
Having said that I probably would have just bought this if it was available at the time. Only 7 inches, which is tiny, but a lot less effort!
I suggest to look at reMarkable tablet, a device with an wink screen which runs Linux and respects the GPL. Has been discussed before on HN [1] They recently added documentation about developing apps for the devices [2], but the community has been doing that for years
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25124211 [2] https://developer.remarkable.com/documentation/qt_epaper
There could be multiple levels of UB certification ranging from : only keys to fully open sourcing the firmware upon termination
i'm new to this but we do want to demonstrate sincerity and put our $ where our mouth is.
Otherwise, imagine this scenario:
Company release a product and pushes out the version for the certification. Updates require new versions to be signed with a particular key. A couple months later, the key is leaked! Okay, so keys are rotated and a new update is pushed and the old key is blocked.
What happens to the certification? What use is the certified key? What use is the certified source code? The certification should mandate a user-activatable factory-reset to the certified keys and code, which can't be tampered with by firmware to block or modify a different firmware from being installed.
Escrow triggered by insolvency or product termination would substantially improve on the status quo.
We can only hope that, if and when this happens, they release the code before actual insolvency, otherwise the IP may fall into the hands of a less scrupulous organization.
Whether TRMNL is actually using an escrow, who knows, but this is a problem that can and has been solved.
Given the source they’ve already released along with their BYOD option I’m inclined to believe them.
TRMNL has said things about providing the ability to hack your device or bring your own device and followed through. They’ve taken concrete steps.
The Google motto was more abstract. After they promised that what concrete steps did they take to show follow through?
People are unreliable. They change their behavior based on circumstance. The person who posted the pledge may well mean it right now, but then some things change and it all goes out the window.
Even worse is that companies change hands. The old owners sell or, heaven forbid, the previous owner dies. When companies change owners, all previous promises have no meaning.
They can be perfectly solvent and simply decide they don’t want to play anymore, take their ball, and go home.
Or they can be acquired and the new owners can tell the community to pound sand.
Finally, when companies are insolvent they tend to not have the resources to follow through on things like this. Including maintaining things in escrow.
> [...] hereby affirms our intent to [...]
A pledge like that is like a promise — it can be broken with no consequence.
To answer their question:
> how will we handle growing server costs?
Not with words alone!
First, it's an intent, not a promise. Second, if you are acquired or product sold, then no such promises/intent mean anything anymore. Calling it the "Unbrickable Pledge" sounds like a bit of an overstatement.
So far I’ve been happy with the default offerings so I haven’t tried it but it’s nice to know there is always an escape hatch.
Hrm.
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I think maintenance and care of this sort is a reasonable requirement
Other than a degree in material science or something similar, that is. Maybe something a bit more digestible, like a book.
> Stay focused.. Progress to retirement: xx % | yyyy Weeks left
nice reminder :)
For a niche product like this, most likely it will be hot pile of garbage.