Comment by NikxDa

I made this thing [1] for us, it uses a cheap 10" e-paper display off aliexpress, an ESP32 and a couple of I2C sensors. The case is 3D-printed. It runs on two 18650 batteries, and all in all it cost less than 100$. The OpenWeather API is free for personal use.

[1] https://mjones-foui.no/img/wall_clock_1.png

My solution was to buy a used Samsung tablet with OLED screen, and control the display on with motion sensors. It sits in the hallway, above the keys drawer. The screen is on only when someone's walking nearby, and around eye level when you go pick up the keys. Designed the dashboard based around muted colours on black background, with brights reserved for "hey pay attention to this" data. And most importantly, the screen is not visible from any spot you're likely to stay at for a longer time. As for mounting, I used calipers, 3d printer and some double sided tape. It's not completely seamless, but damn close for ~10% of the effort.

You might be interested in knowing about https://trmnl.com. No affiliation beyond interest in buying a few in the future. They have a 10.3" version in the works.

You can make smaller ones for much much less. I’ll post pics of mine a bit later but waveshare 7.5” display in a photo frame and almost any ESP32 dev board and you are set for less than $100 (along with suitable HomeAssistant and ESPhome infrastructure to support it). The original article is a very slick bit of work, so well done

OP's Timeframe looks rad, but yes on the pricy side. check out trmnl .com for smaller / less expensive options and self hosted options. (disclaimer: i'm on the team)

I did a similar thing with a regular backlit computer screen.

It automatically shuts off after 30 seconds of inactivity.

I added a $3 webcam, and use openCV to detect motion. If three consecutive frames (sampled 0.5s apart) are each sufficiently difficult from the previous one, it attaches a virtual USB mouse, then moves it one pixel.

This wakes up the display whenever you walk past, then puts it back to sleep again when you stop moving.

The motion-detection pipeline uses less than 0.3% CPU on an intel N100 (6w TDP).

There are lots of other eInk devices you can use LVGL with.

ReTerminal and other derivatives from Seeed Studio are two options. Seeed even has a newish color unitfor under $250 [0].

Not trying to diminish all of the thought and work that's gone into OPs project but a lot of this has been available to do in HomeAssistant for quite some time. Glad more people are finally seeing the value in eInk like this. I've been using them for a while in my office and bedroom for simple status as the OP states: only showing certain status depending on state.

The other unit I tinkered with quite a bit of is the Heltec Vision Master E290 [1] which is a 3" eInk devices for under $35. Based on ESP32 and has LoRa.

[0] https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-E1004-p-6692.html [1] https://heltec.org/project/vision-master-e290/

There are a couple of options for a large, non-backlit, low power display that are less expensive than the e-ink monitor they're using. One is the Samsung EM32DX, a 32" color e-ink digital sign for <$1300 (<$1000 if you can find it on sale) but it has a long refresh time. The other is the SVD rE 32" reflective LCD monitor for ~$1000, but it needs to be in brightly lit rooms because of its low contrast.

e-ink is low-power and easy on the eyes. But for a cheaper project recipe:

    * repurposed old LCD rotated to portrait mode
    * Raspberry Pi 400
    * Debian with Sway showing various tiled terminals/browser windows
    * self-hosted REST server that collects/provides data to display

I have a similar setup at home with a homemade dashboard. It's less polished and I've never implemented smart home (don't use any smart home devices) but it's calendar, weather, air quality and subway alerts. I also took the tack of building the UI with Bootstrap 3 so that it will run on any of my ancient devices like a gen 2 ipad air. I did it as much to usefully recycle old screens as anything else.