Alternatives
Products that do what My solar-powered, ePaper digital photo frame does
This is version 2 of my ongoing heirloom device project, a digital photo frame built with the goal of lasting longer than your typical gadget. There's a part of me that wishes to commercialize a polished version of this product, but the more I speak to people, the more I become convinced that I belong to a very small minority.
- 1IM
Looks like this year ePaper projects have been popping around[1], so this is mine. I made a photo frame with the intention of having a record of my family's history that can potentially outlive me. Knowing the challenges of long-lived digital projects, I consider this a moving target that will go through several iterations, but the first version showed encouraging results. I wonder if anyone else is interested in having something like that in their living rooms. More details:…
2020
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2023 · eliot.blog
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A hobby project of mine that was surprisingly easy to put together! I love waking up and seeing the freshly generated image.
2024 · github.com
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Hey HN! A few years ago someone kept trying to steal my motorcycle, so I decided to make a small camera with really long battery life to catch them. The hardware/software is totally open source, but the companion app only supports macOS currently. (I'm a big fan of native apps, and didn't want to block releasing on Linux/Windows support.) I wrote some blog posts about the process: PCB design: https://toaster.llc/blog/pcb Enclosure design: https://toaster.llc/blog/enclosure Image pipeline:…
2024 · toaster.llc
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I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it. It draws a single pixel at a time and takes 30-60 minutes to complete a single image. Anyone can participate in the project by voting for the next image to be drawn, and submitting images. https://kilopx.com/
2025 · benholmen.com
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I built a digital photo frame, from my a-decade-old tablet, running android 4.4.4. It cycles through photos from a shared Google Photos album, switching up the display every hour.
2024 · pankajtanwar.in
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2021 · blog.framelabs.eu
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Hi HN! I quit my job two years ago to have more time to work on my side projects. The main one is an automated solar concentrator. I've just open-sourced it, it's not perfect nor finished, and I still have a lot of ideas for further development, but I'm interested in knowing what you think of it. There are many applications where concentrated solar power could be a viable environmental and economic solution, I hope this technology will one day be more widely used. Feel free to give any feedback and ask questions.
2024 · github.com
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using RF to power an MCU and 21 animated LEDs from a smartphone
9d ago · wilsonharper.net
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2017 · sunboxlabs.com
- 15BA
Hi. I heard HN likes e-paper gadgets so I wanted to share a little side project I’ve been working on with @sqfmi. We’re building Beepberry - a portable e-paper computer for hackers, designed for chatting on Beeper. My day job is running Beeper [0], but I will always have a soft spot for building hardware. I wanted to create a ‘weekend’ device that would let me stay in touch with friends and family, without the distractions of a full smartphone. I imagined a tiny, hackable e-paper screen with a physical keyboard, powered by a Raspberry Pi, that I could use to chat around my home…and pretty…
2023 · beepberry.sqfmi.com
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2019 · deskgap.com
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It took me a few years of fits and starts but I've finally got my DIY persistence of vision bike light to display video! I designed and built the PCB for it and wrote the code for the wifi streaming of video frames with a bit of help from Claude. This was actually one thing I was dreading as I was hitting a wall being burned out on this project. With a little bit of Claude's help in getting the ESP32 wifi stack working It's finally finished! Some tech specs: Using an ESP32 42 LED's per strip, 4 strips total spaced 90 deg apart. Angular resolution of the image is 1 deg so it updates all 168…
2025 · youtube.com
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2020 · balena.io
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- 24IM
2023 · stavros.io
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