I’ve had the following thing on my wall since 2020:
It’s fun because it’s an epaper frame that runs on battery — so I can have it conspicuously displayed on a wall without any wires leading to it. Mysterious! Enigmatic! And it just displays the temperature and the currently playing album.
It’s fine, but it’s a bit small (I gotta put on my correct glasses to see what the temperature is)… and the firmware isn’t unproblematic: Out of every twenty times it wakes up and fetches a new image, it goes to “can’t find wifi”, which is just kinda annoying.
But then, last week, I read of a new generation of epaper devices with brilliant colours and neat features.
Wow! Bigger! Better! Gotta have it! And yesterday it arrived.
After flashing it with the ESP32 PhotoFrame firmware (from a web page! I had no idea that you could do USB flashing via web pages, but apparently there’s something called “The Web Serial API” that does that? Chrome only, of course. kids these days), and a session with Claude where it really wanted to download some Node nonsense a lot, I convinced it to just write me a bash script to upload images to the thing. The result is on Microsoft Github — it’s super duper trivial, but the clue is that the device needs to have a paletted PNG, which makes sense.
Tada! It works! I’ve set it to download a new image once every fifteen minutes, which is correctish enough…
But. Look at this.
Or perhaps — don’t look at that, because it seems likely to give you an epileptic fit.
That’s just… that’s just… that’s just ridiculous. How is this even something that’s a product? You can’t have this thing displayed somewhere people can see it and not expect people to fall on their asses, laughing. It’s ridiculous.
It makes sense as something that only updates, say, once a day — in the middle of the night, where nobody can see it. Hide the shame.
So… man… I have to rethink what I’m going to use it for, because I can’t have this hanging on my living room wall.
Man.
And in the promo pic they’re displaying a clock, sort of implying that you’d have this thing update once per minute? When it takes half a minute to do an update?
Dude.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFHGS82S3fAHeh, in the promo version they do show the frame updating… but if you look at 67s, they’re editing out bits *and* running it at, like, 10x speed (look at the laptop movements).
C’mon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHbA2-_qzH4Perhaps somebody brilliant will be able to do something neat with this device, though? Partial updates would help a lot, for instance, if you’re displayin a clock or something on a bit of the display. I guess time will tell…