E-Ink literary/weather/photoframe display powered by HA

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Hi everyone,

I've been doing this for a few months and just put the
code up on GitHub: an ambient Inkplate 10 - 9.7″ e-ink dashboard ("Ink Almanac") that
HA drives almost entirely on its own. Battery-powered, estimated ~3 months between
charges. All usecases work as I want them. Claude Code ftw.

Repo: Github Ink-almanac

What it does

Five views rotate across the day:

  • Morning — a giant Didone clock, current weather with a minutely
    nowcast ("clearing in 21 min"), 3-day forecast, plus a short poem or
    aphorism with a 400-character "smart pill" gloss on one word in it.
  • Daytime — a daily curated photograph or typeset poem fills the
    panel.
  • Weather — slower, fuller view: two locations, 5-day forecast,
    sun/moon, and "what's happening this week" astronomy.
  • Night — natural-language clock ("quarter to ten") + a moonlit
    woodblock print.
  • Now-Playing — whenever Sonos starts, the panel switches to album
    art + track info. Classical recordings get a composer-anchored layout
    (work / movement / named performers); pop falls back to artist /
    title / album.

Tap the frame to flip between the day's main view and the forecast —
a small dot near the battery icon confirms the tap before the next
image actually paints.

Sample (i’m allowed to add only one image in the post)

nowplaying-classical
nowplaying-classical1200×825 92.8 KB

(Screenshots of all five faces are in the README.)

How HA fits in

This is the part this forum might find most interesting — there's no
ESPHome involved; the device is custom firmware that just polls the
renderer and reads MQTT for face changes. HA does:

  • Face rotation via a per-tier alternation tick (every 15 min) that
    publishes inkplate/command/active_mode (retained).
  • Renderer-input publishing — clock every minute, weather on every
    sensor change, sonos on state_changed, all via rest_command: POSTs
    to a small Node renderer running on a Mac mini.
  • Gesture handling — tap MQTT events flip a phase-offset helper that
    XORs against the schedule's natural parity, so a tap toggles between
    main view and weather without persistent state.
  • Sonos override — when media_player.<sonos> transitions to
    playing, an input_text.inkplate_active_override flips and the
    device polls per-minute for ~60 s track-change latency.
  • Operator-pushable wake schedule — per-tier full_min / poll_min
    / partial_min lives in a YAML file; an automation validates it and
    republishes to retained MQTT on every edit. The firmware picks it up
    on the next wake.

What you need on the HA side: Mosquitto + Advanced SSH add-ons; MQTT,
Sonos, Open-Meteo, and (optional) OpenWeatherMap One Call 3.0
integrations; HA Companion for low-battery pings. Full inventory and
walkthrough in the repo's README and SETUP.md.

Costs

Total cost was around €220 + an IKEA frame:

  • Inkplate 10 (9.7″, 1200×825, 3-bit greyscale) from Soldered
  • LSM6DSO IMU breakout for tap detection (one wire to solder — explained
    in the README's Build section)
  • 5000 mAh Li-ion battery
  • IKEA RÖDALM shadow-box frame, 12×16″

Add to that Claude Code subscription + some Claude API calls (around 20$) for curation of the corpus and some realtime bits (like chosing “Starship launch today” vs “Lyrid meteor peak” in the STARS pill - something like a couple of $0.01 per day). And a lot of time (it was amazingly fun, so it is worth it).

The README is fairly detailed already, and the OpenSpec change log under openspec/ has the
design rationale for most of the trickier bits.

Have fun.

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