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AI Agent – TRMNL

help.trmnl.com

51 pointsjoeyespo29 comments

I've been buying (2 so far) Seeed Studio reTerminal e-ink screens, flashing them with ESPHome, then using Claude Code to write backends to render out whatever I want to put on the screens (a la TRMNL, I also have a TRMNL). Being able to "speak" into existence what I want is pretty freaking awesome.

Note: Yes, I know what I'm about to say could be done using TRMNL (as part of it)

I was able to set it up so that it rotates book quotes every day with a picture of the book cover next to the quote. That, on its own, is far from impressive. What made me giddy was that it shows book quotes that I've highlighted in KOReader on my jailbroken Kindle. KOReader syncs up to BookOrbit (open source ebook manager/reading tracking tool). The whole thing happens 100% local to my network.

BookOrbit is running in a docker, my little server to render the book/quote runs in a docker, my Kindle talks to BookOrbit, my ReTerminal talks to HomeAssistant (ESPHome). It's 100% local and it's silly but it's mine and I love it. As I'm reading I highlight something and a day, a week, a month later I see it on the display on my dresser or in my office.

I want to put these all over the place in my house and I already modified it once so each screen will get a different random quote so I don't have to worry about duplicates. I'm considering getting 1 display per book shelf where I have a full series and configuring it so that it just shows quotes I've highlighted from that series. The sky's the limit.

I fully understand no one cares, I get it, this is super-duper-custom, "just for me", and that's what I love.

Have you looked at OpenDisplay? I have recently been playing with 4 color shelf displays from supermarkets. I have one showing max UV in my bathroom and whether I should wear sunscreen. Any Bluetooth proxy can write ODL/OEPL data to the device. There is a designer (https://schlomo.github.io/odl-drawcustom-designer/).

I have not, I'll have to check this out. While I like my smart home stuff off my network (Z-Wave/Zigbee) I do have a soft spot for ESP32 (and it's own SSID/Vlan). I currently don't "manage" any bluetooth devices but I'll have to take a look!

> 4 color

I guess I should just get over myself but color e-ink (I have one) drives me nuts with its refreshing. At least the one I have can't partial refresh so it's a ~20-30 second flashing-hell every time you want to draw anything different. To be fair, I have these updating once a day and when I'm asleep so "who cares" but doing any active development/testing with one is maddening.

EDIT:

Holy crap, the ESP32 vs BT comparison is crazy! I would never have guessed it was that stark. Though it makes sense, I have mine deep sleep for all but <1min every day to wake and update and with config they should last months, but _years_ with regular updates throughout the day? So freaking cool!

I'll probably be looking into some BT screens. It looks a little more DIY than the reTerminals I have but maybe this is the final push to get me, back, into 3D printing (enclosures for the board/screen/battery).

> Writing code is cool, but wouldn't it be cooler to type "build me a plugin showing populations around the world" and it Just Worked?

I can't think of a string of words more unfitting for this website and its audience than this.

Small suggestion on page navigation...

I was not familiar with at TRMNL was and from the link I went to there was no way to get to the "home page" of the product (https://trmnl.com)

I did not see anything in the footer section and clicking on the logo on top only sent me to Help home.

I was trapped with no easy way to learn more about you guys

There was a now-flagged comment [0] saying how excited they were until reading the author’s politics. I was curious. The links I found are all offline but sounded unpleasant. This means I can’t say for sure.

I recognize some folk dislike mixing tech and politics, but human ethics and actions impact the world.

It’s fair to feel distrust for any product based on the values that product’s creator expresses.

I saw the author of TRMNL in this thread so perhaps I can invite him to address that — and in replies, let’s keep discourse civil and HN-like please.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48998497

It seems he had some really “interesting” blog posts on his website. The crazy part is that he took down his blog, but also removed it from The Internet Archive[0]. He’s gone to great lengths to remove his blog posts and that makes me wonder what he really said in those posts.

0. https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://www.ryanckulp.com

https://thewritingsofryankculp.pages.dev/ is this the blog?

From: https://lobste.rs/s/qj60m9/trmnl_e_ink_dashboard_stay_focuse...

https://archive.is/JWBUj#selection-438.0-438.1

https://archive.is/3C5tR

https://d5w6z860qaqqa0.archive.is/3Nu1c/35466b298ffa7adf3e80...

https://archive.is/F3Jlf

"this is wrong, but women deserve it. for years you've let men chop their d*cks off and pretend to be you. you celebrated it. now it's time to pay the piper, which means never winning a sport again. enjoy"

Yeah, my interest in giving money to this guy vanished after learning about this. It’s not like whipping up some eink dashboards is a huge imposition in the AI era for anyone nerdy enough to want this in the first place.

Afaik there’s never been any apology or statement, just a careful scrubbing after this started making its way around nerd spaces.

Edit: Sheesh, I was only familiar with the transphobic remarks. This guy is a lot worse than I thought.

Anyone who says that shit publicly says crazier shit privately. Half the quotes floating around came from his resume and courses he was selling. So presumably the more polished material.

(2024) > for example in private i say “fat people” and “retard” and “trannies are disgusting.” the final leap is doing so online. if it costs me, this [new years] resolution was accomplished.

>> quoted from ryanckulp.com

Yea I don’t think an apology is coming. The scrubbing of statements is contextually a funny plot twist though.

Let me offer a kind possibility: perhaps they were removed because he has changed and no longer feels they represent his views?

You’re right, that is a strong possibility. The skeptic in me thinks he did it because he thought it would affect his sales if word got out. He was ardent in his beliefs and I don’t think people drop those beliefs that easily unless there is a monetary incentive.

Pretty sure there are not 250 countries. How hard is it to validate the enormous number in the header image?

There are some databases including territories and stuff that sometimes lands in the ~250 region, but should be stated if so. Closer to 200-210 or UNs "193 countries" tend to be a bit more common to use though, always depend on what exactly you see as a "country" I suppose.

There are 249 country codes, which is a possible definition used.

Out of the gate, Canada and the US share 1 as country code and includes entities that aren't countries like Globalstar (Mobile Satellite Service):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_telephone_country_code...

It’s not telephone country codes, but ISO 3166 country codes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes

There is no correct answer for the number of countries in the world. I'd recommend this Map Men video on the difficulty of deciding what is or isn't a country: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nB688xBYdY

> How much does it cost to build a plugin?

> We're seeing an average of $1-3 per plugin.

Is this really true, or is it overstated to be safe? Isn't it just a handful of html markup and JS?

we can only estimate token <> cost in our cloud agent, but we also OSS'd the skills and in those cases the cost is ~$0 (part of one's LLM subscription): https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-agent-skills

the agent also has a model switcher, and the estimate you quoted is based on Haiku when we launched.

I would have one FAQ - does it require 20$ developer license?

All I see lately is a router to proprietary api, pfff so tired of this. It is lame that this is in the first page and my post shadowbanned. Same circle over and over. Evaluating forum platform change...

It's so disappointing to watch trmnl, a really interesting hardware product concept, transition into being just another AI company.

Is this really transitioning into another AI company? It's an integration for having a 3rd party AI vibe code plugins for their hardware's interface.

i founded TRMNL and didn't try AI myself until ~2 months ago. i'd rather shut down down and open source everything (per our Unbrickable Pledge) than become "just another AI company."

the AI Agent exists to empower less technical folks to turn their vision into reality, and we're proud of what's possible with it. meanwhile our top community developers continue to hand craft beautiful, useful plugins for everyone to install, LLM free.

I appreciate the effort and I think this is a great way to engage a broader audience. This level of software complexity is perfect for non technical users to vibe code.

Non technical users cannot code. If you want non-technical users to customize the product they purchased you have three options. - Add a narrow surface of customizability hardcoded into the application: colors, maybe fonts, picking from the plugins others have created - Provide a bounded method for using LLMs to generate some code from user requirements, plugin documentation (with code/architectural conventions), and probably some guardrails build process. - Tell them to just YOLO using vanilla claude code/codex

Previously most "personal computing" (building custom stuff for your specific needs) was limited to people that either already are intimately aware of how computers and programming work, or people that were interested in starting down that path.

Plenty of people do not have the time/energy to go down that path, but still want custom stuff. Yes you can't zero-shot robust enterprise software, but the models are good enough to few-shot solid results when it's bounded to some interface requirements (like an SDK).

I don't make many predictions but this is one I am comfortable saying is the future of personal computing and what "harnesses" will look like in the future. Models will shrink and post-train to the use case at the enterprise level, and agent harnesses will go from things like codex/claude code to what look like self-assembling software. Give regular users an app with a plugin system, an agent, and a clear set of entry points and thats all they need to run.

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