GoKawiilThe summers in my region are quite dry, hot & rather unbearable. So, to get some refuge from all of this, I wanted to try out a few different measures, which would effectively reduce the temperature of my house. I thought a good starting point for this would be to establish a baseline and find out the standard deviation. To do this, I realized I’d need to observe the temperature & humidity of my house for a certain duration.
At the same time I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of content recommended to me by algorithms on social media, especially YouTube, Instagram & Reddit. Hacker News, with its rather transparent algorithm and RSS feeds of the authors I like seemed like a good start to take control of the content I consume, which is why I had set up miniflux, and it’s been going well. It’s just that I tend to miss some of the cutting edge stuff which appears regularly on HN. Especially with the AI/LLM stuff.
Also, I am interested in astronomical events like occultation of certain stars & planets by the moon or eclipses, etc., so that I can decide whether I can try to observe those with my telescope. Which is also related to my interest in knowing the air quality around my house.
While I was thinking this, I realized that I had an e-paper display that’s sitting in the electronics basket at the corner of my room, collecting dust. One fine day, I decided to use Claude Code to finally build something for it, and use it as a static display which serves things I mentioned above.
I had bought it from hubtronics.in a couple of years back, when I was working on a project which involved embedded programming on STM32/MC60. It’s the T5 e-Paper module from LILYGO. It has an ESP32 chip integrated, which supports WiFi & Bluetooth.
Component LILYGO T5 4.7" e-Paper SoC ESP32, dual-core Xtensa LX6 @ 240 MHz Wireless Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz (802.11 b/g/n), Bluetooth 4.2 + BLE Memory 520 KB SRAM · 8 MB PSRAM · 16 MB flash Display 4.7" e-Paper · 960 × 540 · 16-level grayscale (ED047TC1) Extras USB-C, Li-Po connector, RTC, ~170 µA sleep current
User Interface
So, next question was how do I project this data on the display. The structure, form of the content, and what pieces of it need to grab my attention the most.
First Attempt
I started way too unstructured, and was caught off guard quickly. I hadn’t given any attention to the layout, and ended up printing everything as a single left aligned blob of text.
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