Life Dashboard: Heads-up display for everyday life

https://github.com/davidhampgonsalves/life-dashboard

by lemonspat • 6 years ago

199 38 6 years ago

haswell• 6 years ago

I've recently spent some time setting up Home Assistant [0] to corral the many smart devices in my home. In addition to the many IoT device control capabilities, HA has a rich integration/add-on ecosystem, and can pull in all sorts of additional data about daily life (financial feeds, weather, etc).

The missing piece for me right now is a device that acts as a control hub.

I hadn't considered using a Kindle, but now I'm excited about the possibilities. If I can use Life Dashboard to receive status information from HA (and possibly even send commands to devices), this might be the solution to that final missing piece.

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io

lytedev• 6 years ago

I use an old laptop! They make great little servers.

0x426577617265• 6 years ago

I use this software on a 5” LCD. The intended use is to make a mirror

https://magicmirror.builders/

dh-g6• 6 years ago

I would recommend a paperwhite since you can use the real time clock to enter deep sleep and run the device off battery. Its the only complaint I have with my current device.

thefunnyman• 6 years ago

Have you looked into running Home Assistant Cast [0] on something like a Google Home Hub?

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2019/08/06/home-assistant...

fooblat• 6 years ago

Neat project but, contrary to the title, it is not in fact a heads up display.

NikolaeVarius• 6 years ago

Yeah, how is this more of a HUD than any portable screen?

Fnoord• 6 years ago

Its not 'just any portable screen' though. It is like task event which could be part of a calendar, except a Kindle (with e-ink) is used for this purpose. Quite clever usage of an e-reader.

gumby• 6 years ago

I assume it was a pun, for the other kind of “heads up”. The surf report says that to me.

StavrosK• 6 years ago

Also, it's "head-up display".

dh-g6• 6 years ago

Good point, I was thinking more along the lines of "heads-up" right as a walk out the door and since this project was just for my own usage I didn't scrutinize the readme copy.

hawktheslayer2• 6 years ago

Thanks, this might just motivate me to dust off my old Kindle. I recently started doing James Clear's habit tracker and now would love to find a way to track my habits on my Kindle if possible.

marvindanig2• 6 years ago

i tried one of these fancy tricks on one of my Kindle earlier this year. then i threw all the Kindles away.

hawktheslayer2• 6 years ago

Too much work, or bad results, or what?

Semaphor• 6 years ago

what did you replace them with?

dh-g6• 6 years ago

I found developing in the kindle pretty nice and if you want a quick start there is a pre-compiled python for it and golang can compile directly to the arm architecture that it uses.

rozab• 6 years ago

Check this out: https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits

xyzelement• 6 years ago

Similar idea, even more low-tech and ambient: https://github.com/edmarkovich/pi-productivity

mellosouls• 6 years ago

The project uses a serverless backend to collate data from external services and on the Kindle itself Rust code (cross compiled via docker) fetches and typesets the data into an image

If this is just a daily image, wouldn't it be a lot easier to just email the generated image to a non-modified Kindle on a daily schedule? It would require manually clicking 2 buttons every day to display it (Home > Today's Image), though presumably that side of it could be automated on the Kindle with much less modification.

dh-g6• 6 years ago

This isn't just an image, mostly b/c I initially wanted to do everything on the device (and it uses a weird image encoding) but interacting with Google api's in Rust was a pin (at the time).

schwartzworld• 6 years ago

Even easier, the Kindle has a web browser so you could just serve up an html page on your network and navigate to that, but that wouldn't be as fun or cool

ubertoop2• 6 years ago

Pretty sweet project and from browsing the source I learned about a very cool fintech lib I'd never heard of: Plaid.

Gets the cogs turning with ideas. Thanks for the post.

ampdepolymerase• 6 years ago

Plaid is a fintech unicorn, not just a library.

ErikAugust• 6 years ago

As far as I remember when I researched Plaid, it’ll ask for the credentials (email/password) for your online banking accounts. That was a deal breaker for me.

MetalGuru2• 6 years ago

Yeah, plaids flagship feature is instant bank verification. It replaces the archaic micro-deposit method for allowing users to auth their bank account.

ubertoop2• 6 years ago

Yea that seems super sketchy.

Are they web scraping?

MetalGuru2• 6 years ago

Another really cool fintech API is Modern Treasury. Or Stripe Treasury

dh-g6• 6 years ago

This is my project, was very happy to see it suddenly on the front page.

I've been using it for over a year and its consistently been useful if anyone is on the fence about building one.

danbruder• 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing this. Very cool use case for old kindles

igonvalue• 6 years ago

In order for this to work, one needs to jailbreak the Kindle. Is there a way to jailbreak a Kindle Oasis running the 5.12.x firmware? (My reading of the MobileRead Forums says this is impossible.)

captn3m0• 6 years ago

Not possible currently.

dkarp• 6 years ago

I did a similar project with Kindle Paperwhite running for over 2 months on a full charge. It would boot early each morning, connect to wifi, pull latest weather and news, generate a png containing weather and news, show the png on the screen, shut down wifi, set RTC to boot again tomorrow and power down.

The problem I had is that eventually when it ran out of battery, I charged it and the process didn't kick off again. Probably I just need to ssh back in a get it going again, but I lost interest at that point!

keyle2• 6 years ago

Slightly offtopic: is there anything else useful you can do with an old kindle?

I have 2 laying around catching dust...

keyle2• 6 years ago

update: forget it. I tried to jail break my PW2 and it lead to nowhere after 3 hours of attempts. The newest firmware (which it automatically updated to without asking) has blocked the downgrading to an older firmware, making the jailbreak unsuccessful.

NB: if you plan on jailbreaking an old Kindle, put it in airplane mode as soon as possible. If it upgrades past 5.10+, you're done.

dh-g6• 6 years ago

Animated low-power pictures would be my favorite: https://hackernoon.com/my-experience-in-creating-the-worlds-...

grenfrew• 6 years ago

Fantastic work. Using the Kindle rather than the browser must be better on the mind and the eyes. I wanted to try something similar myself using Plaid. Thanks for sharing and good job.

makuto• 6 years ago

I did something similar with a Raspberry Pi and Waveshare e-ink display: https://github.com/makuto/home-life-display

Life Dashboard: Heads-up display for everyday life

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