TRMNL

A while back I tried setting up an old iPad as a “family dashboard” of sorts, just a quick way to list out upcoming events, the weather, maybe meals for the week or another important note. It kind of… sucked, for a lot of reasons, namely needing to configure a user for the device and the iPadOS widgets not being an ideal UI for “at a glance (at a distance)” viewing.

I looked at things like DAKboard, but plugging a monitor on the wall feels like a solution for a dentist’s office more than a home.

I saw the e-ink display TRMNL when it was first released, but at the time I had resigned to using a whiteboard to keep track of things, and it sold out before I could really consider it as an option. They came back in stock recently so I picked up a Sage Green one which, as far as color choices on a piece of technology goes, is pretty nice.

Setup was super easy: turn it on, connect it to the local network, go on the TRMNL website and configure some plugins and… shortly thereafter, they show up. The pro and con to it as a device is that to give it a battery life of a few months it makes network requests relatively infrequently. That said, it’s clear at how far apart those requests are when configuring the plugins, unlike iPadOS widgets which occasionally decide to stop getting updates at all, period, forever, for no obvious reason1.

The only other downside is the screen is pretty small. It’s 7.5” which is objectively smaller than the iPad we were using before, but the UI is appropriately scaled to use the space unlike an iPadOS home screen. So it’s… ok. If they made a 12 or 13” I’d think about getting that for the kitchen and moving this to my desk.

The TRMNL “playlists” on the website have a nice feature where you can change what shows at different times of the day. So in the morning it sticks to a split view of upcoming events/weather, and in the afternoon it shuffles through a few different screens, including this low res Calvin and Hobbes comic plugin. Screenshot of the Calvin and Hobbes comic for the TRMNL plugin.

Footnotes

  1. I’ve only had this for a day so, who knows, maybe that’ll happen here too. ↩