Building a Real-Time HN Display for $15

(medium.com)

28 points | by kylegalbraith 4 days ago ago

6 comments

  • augusteo 3 hours ago

    Nice project. The $15 price point is genuinely impressive for something like this.

    I've been curious about e-ink displays for a while but haven't taken the plunge. What's the refresh rate like in practice? And does it actually help you notice interesting posts you'd otherwise miss, or is it more of a fun desk decoration?

    • mlhpdx 2 hours ago

      The refresh rate must be something like 20fps when scrolling the text of long posts. I’m not sure and haven’t measured.

      While I’m working I glance at it from time to time and get a sense of the wide breadth of conversations going on at any moment.

  • lormayna an hour ago

    Why not using MQTT? A Lambda that fetch new comments from HN, parse them into Markdown and push into MQTT; the ESP only needs to subscribes a topic on MQTT and render the messages.

  • hyperbolablabla an hour ago

    This is awesome. I've been meaning to check out WireGuard for some time, and this project has been inspiring for me. Thanks!

  • cyode 2 hours ago

    Satisfying to see all the payload request and response sizes in bytes not kb.

    Q: the display just starts at 0 and increments comment id by 1 every 10 seconds. Has the device caught up to latest? If you power cycle it, do you have to run through all historical comments?

    • mlhpdx 2 hours ago

      The zero is just a magic number to indicate grab the newest. So it’s just showing the most recent comments.