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TRMNL: hackable e-ink dashboard to put anywhere [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2026-07-07  

TRMNL is a battery-powered e-ink display that sits on a desk, shelf or refrigerator and shows the information you choose—calendars, weather, sales pipelines, transit times, the latest church wall collapse news, etc.—without pinging, glowing, irradiating your genitals or otherwise demanding attention. The screen is a 7.5-inch monochrome panel in a soft-touch case with a kickstand, and a battery charge is claimed to last about three months. The work of Ryan Kulp and a small team, it started as a crowdfunding campaign in 2024.

The platform lists more than 1,000 apps that work on or with the device, most of them community-built, and screens can be arranged into tiled "playlists" that rotate through dashboards. Data flows one way, from their server to the device, and the firmware and plug-in framework lives on GitHub under a "hackers welcome" policy; the same firmware runs on old Kindles, Raspberry Pis and DIY kits. The upgraded TRMNL X, currently backordered, ups to a 10.3-inch 1,872-by-1,404 panel with 16 grayscale levels, faster refresh (1.2 seconds full, 200 milliseconds partial), touch gestures, an accelerometer for rotation, 5 GHz Wi-Fi, a screws-not-glue enclosure and up to six months per charge.

Your device, your data. TRMNL's architecture prevents outsiders (including us) from accessing your local network. We achieve this through 1 way communication between client and server, versus the other way around. Learn how it works.

Previously: Invisible Computers' Invisible Display, a wall-mounted wood-framed panel built for Google Calendar; Seeed's reTerminal E series, which offers a color-panel option; InkyPi (previously at Boing Boing), an open-source Raspberry Pi dashboard with plugins and a web interface but no proprietary hardware at all, and Pimoroni's Inky Frame, a DIY-tastic color e-ink board built around a Pico W.

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/07/07/trmnl-hackable-e-ink-dashboard-to-put-anywhere.html

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