I've uploaded my ESPHome config and the spacer STL and wrote a guide on this epaper art frame build on my blog! Check it out:

Bloomin8 is an indie kickstarted brand that is also working on e-ink frames (that will be @home-assistant.io compatible), they have this demo video showing performance with actual photos on a larger screen:

So the big Spectra 6 screens have more size and resolution to pull it off… but they come at exponential cost. Eg Switchbot just announced this one, the 31” model has 2560x1440 pixels but it also costs €1500 💸

Check our your local gamestores, they often have open game nights. Great way to meet new people who want to play boardgames! I still have nights with groups of uni friends every few months, but now ppl have kids, it’s gotten a lot harder to plan and they are much shorter than 15y ago.

Tabletop game groups are back. Home poker nights have fallen out of popularity again after the late 00/early 10s boom, I feel. Or I’m just no longer in the right age bracket to get invited 😅

And of course, I’ll put my ESPHome yaml and the spacer STLs online soon! Want to clean them up a little first😄

Honestly, I’m pretty stoked about this experiment. I think color e-ink is starting to get good enough for art/photo display. High res big panels are still very expensive 💸 but at this size it’s an affordable start!

The RÖDALM’s back is made out of cardboard and can easily be cut to provide access to the E1002’s buttons and USB-C charging port. This way, I probably never have to take the display out of the frame again. The frame’s metal tabs aren’t great, so let’s not bend them too often 😅

The ESPHome config I use displays a random image from my @home-assistant.io server, then goes into deep sleep for a few hours. When it wakes up again automatically, it loads a new image. This way, I see new art a few times each day and still stretch the E1002’s battery to last for weeks.

The mat the RÖDALM comes with does partly cover up the e-ink panel, so it’d be nice to create a custom mat that doesn’t block anything in the future. But out-of-the-box, it’s already pretty well aligned.

The display’s case also looks more futuristic than artsy. But here’s the twist - the E1002 fits nicely inside a cheap IKEA RÖDALM 13x18cm frame! 🖼️

There’s some gaps, but they’re easily filled with some 3D-printed spacers.

By itself, the E1002 is a nicely cased Spectra6 e-ink panel with 800x480 resolution. That’s too low for photography, imho, as the e-ink requires dithering using the 6 colors it can do.

This creates a pixelated effect that doesn’t look great on photos - but it’s fine for illustrations!

Oh I could imagine a TRMNL could work for that. But maybe the openepaperlink project could be a good fit: it’s open source firmware for the type of small eink price tags they use in supermarkets. Could be nice for a small door display. I’m a big fan of their project.

openepaperlink.de

If you have certain things you know you want to display, but don’t want to go through the trouble of running all that through HA or coding the screens, TRMNL gets you going much much faster. Like, a calendar and weather display is up and running in seconds. Harder to do in HA/ESPHome.

If you think you want to have HA as your single source of truth and anything you’d display would come from there, and you don’t mind custom coding (esphome) or puppeteering (image capturing HA dashboards) what to show, I’d go for an ESPHome based eink display. E.g. Seeed Xiao or reTerminal lines.

Depends on what you want to do, the TRMNL and Home Assistant philosophies are kinda different. TRMNL is best for running on their cloud server stack, working with their stock plugins out of the box.

For HA, you get infinite local customizability.