Cool! I do! Thanks for supporting the community.
I am having a hard time understanding why there is a fee to use the devices we already purchased. I understand the need for ongoing fees to support cloud services, but my HA instance runs locally and does not put any additional load on the Visionect services at all.
I found this thread hoping to find a way to use the expensive Joan hardware I purchased before the monthly fees were introduced. At the time there was also a locally hosted server option, in addition to the cloud service. Now all of it requires fees, and I have two lovely e-waste devices collecting dust in my office.
I sat down with my now-defunct Joan devices and finally figured out how to make them useful with HA, without paying extra fees.
You will need:
- Home Assistant
- Joan eInk devices
- A docker container running Visionect Server 7.6.5 or earlier - before they required per-device subscription fees
- Some sort of kiosk mode add-on for HA. I used AppDaemon.
Use the Joan Configurator tool to update the server URL on each device to point to your locally running instance of Visionect. Then change the content of the device to whatever the URL of your HA kiosk page is.
My Joan 6 seems to be stuck on “fetching language data” its set to hit my local Visionect Server 7.6.5 and I can see it connected on the dashboard but I cannot get it to display anything and the logs say have an error: " * Handling error: No translation was found for msgid “Loading” in msgctxt “” and domain “joan” (line #86)"
Nothing of note in the Visionect server logs on docker.
Any thoughts?