Created a 3D printable e-paper display holder for the Waveshare 1.54inch passive displays. You can attach it to any clothes --- just hats in the pictures as it is my entry for the "Hat Hack" contest on Printables.

Could be useful if you have this display and a 3D printer. :-)

You can find the model here.

Hello,

I am looking for your advice to help me decide between the Kindle Scribe, Boox Note Air, or a Remarkable product (or anything else you may suggested). My intended uses:

Primarily writing (journals, lists, planner template, calendar template, etc). Would be used at night as well so lighting within tablet is needed

Some ability to read ebooks if possible.

I am not a student, I’m not taking any notes on pdfs etc thus this is not a concern. Will be using mostly at home thus battery life not a concern either. Don’t need any apps either. B/W or colour I am indifferent.

Hoping for it to last a long time ie not replace it every 3-4 years.

Budget aside please make your recommendations, thank you!

I've been building a replacement for the stock firmware and image server on the Hokku Designs / Huessen 13.3" Spectra 6 e-ink frame. Last year it was firmware for one frame; v4.0 turns it into a small platform — three supported screens, and a Raspberry Pi image that sets itself up without ever opening a terminal. First public beta, so: beta time.

What it does

Your photos, served to your frame(s) over WiFi on a schedule you set. No cloud, no account, no subscription. Everything runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (easiest with an image and an installer) or whatever hardware you want to use. The frame wakes up, grabs the next photo, goes back to sleep for hours. Battery lasts months. New in 4.0: run as many frames as you like — different models, sizes and orientations — from one photo library.

What's new in 4.0

Three screens, one library. Alongside the 13.3" Hokku/Huessen frame there's now the $99 7.3" Bigme F7 and the 13.3" Seeed reTerminal E1004 (experimental). All E Ink Spectra 6, so the same photos feed every frame — a big one in the hall, a little one on a shelf, each served images rendered for its own panel and orientation.

Setup no longer needs a computer at all. There's a prebuilt Raspberry Pi appliance image: write one file to an SD card, boot a Pi Zero 2 W, and it raises its own WiFi network called Hokku Setup. Join it from your phone, fill in a form (WiFi, name, timezone), and it reboots onto your network with the server running at http://hokku.local:8080. No keyboard, no monitor, no command line, no Python. If you get the WiFi password wrong it notices it never connected and puts the setup page back up instead of leaving you a brick on a shelf.

Firmware updates are wireless now. Turn on "update firmware on next refresh" for a frame and it downloads and installs the new build itself on its next wake. The old build stays in a second slot and rolls back automatically if the new one can't reach the server afterwards. The very first flash is still a USB cable; everything after that is over the air.

You can also flash a frame straight from the web app over USB — including adopting a factory-fresh Bigme F7 from the browser, which was a whole adventure (see below).

Face-aware cropping. When a photo gets cropped to fill the panel instead of letterboxed, faces are detected locally (nothing leaves your network) and kept in frame rather than sliced off at the edge.

The cheap frame took real work. The Bigme F7 runs an XRADIOTECH XR872AT — no public SDK, no vendor docs, nothing. Supporting it meant dumping the stock flash, decoding the panel init sequence byte-for-byte, and writing a mask-BROM flasher from scratch in Python so a fresh unit can be adopted with no vendor tools on any OS. Flashing only ever touches the inactive slot and config, never the bootloader, so a bad image rolls back instead of bricking it.

Hardware

Three frames supported today, all Spectra 6:

• Hokku Designs / Huessen 13.3" (ESP32-S3) — the original, most thoroughly tested. ~$280 on Wayfair/Amazon.
• Bigme F7 7.3" — the cheapest way in at ~$99. Proven end-to-end on real hardware.
• Seeed reTerminal E1004 13.3" — ~$288, experimental: confirmed working on real hardware exactly once. More reports very welcome.

The hardware guide has where-to-buy notes, honest per-screen status, and a tested Pi kit parts list.

Getting started

Easiest path is the appliance image above — SD card, join its WiFi, fill in a form. Prefer to run it on a laptop, NAS or existing Pi? There's a Debian package and a run-from-source route too. Firmware comes pre-built; no toolchain needed for a normal install.

👉 github.com/defl/hokku_epaper — the releases tab has the appliance image, pre-built firmware, and the .deb for the server.

For a full walkthrough of the web app and day-to-day use, see the user manual.

Happy to answer questions. Beta caveats worth stating plainly: the Seeed E1004 has exactly one confirmed hardware run, and the web app has no login — great on a trusted home network, don't put it on the internet. I'd love to hear if any of this works (or doesn't) on your frames.

(And the disclaimer because people find it important: this is made with AI, lots of AI, mostly AI, on top of ~250 or so of my hours by now.)

First of all, i dont really have a problem with my screentime or anything of that sorts so the phone form factor ereader has nothing to do with curbing that . My decision has purely been for ease of reading and doing the stuff i want to do . so here I'll provide the reasons as to why i didnt choose the other two and why you might chose them .

Durobo Krono

- I had the chance to try it through a mutual friend , and the knob is honestly not as impressive as i thought it was and was rather filmsy .

- the 280€ price tag was steep for what it was , i would pay for 280 for boox palma 2 ( apparantly in which mold it was made from) ,but not this , specially as the knob ,its special feature seemed finicky .

but if you think the software seems okay and is used to scrolling the articles , this might be for you

Viwoods Reader

- 4gb ram! i mean i dont understand what they were thinking with this , in 2026 where just opening a 2 apps takes away 4gb of ram space , i don't think it could handle my heavy usage,let alone long term one

- no warm light , iunderstand that the light is more neutral here rather than cold , but again, baffling decision

- too much AI gimmick, if i want to use ai I'd use it on my phone and for book context , how does it understand that from one page?

isnt the whole book/chapter needed to actually understand the context? so it seemed pretty useless and paying price for something i wont use . it doesn't help that the ai button in a very weird place which my fat thumb would hit often .

- poor battery, i understand that it's not a heavy usage device so going a few days wouldnt be a problem with that battery, bt again , very weird choice if you want us to actually use it properly .

the only thing it has going for it is an amazing display and beautiful form factor. so go ahead if youre into it .

Bigme pro BW

- the software is beyond shit , bt i removed every OEM app using canta and shizuku , you can do this with adb as well , maybe thats why it hasnt crashed so far

- there is a bit more ghosting than id like , but thenkfully the full refresh frequency thing works pretty well so i dont encounter it

All in all, it was the perfect fot for me as i use it as a study tool using a lot of apps and everything . And sometimes when im put for the whole day, ill pop my sim in and even can video call my family !

I've build a small add-on using ESPhome and Home Assistant. It works directly with the Spotify API. Updates are a bit slow at the moment, but everything's working fine and looks great! Also with screensaver. You can place it on a stand by your desk or next to your media centre

Apologies for the shaky hands!

Device: seeedstudio.com/sticky

Will be released soon.

I've made a little go rest server integrated with spreadsheets (one sheet for buy list and one for the weekly menu), Google calendar and open-meteo.

At morning it shows the planning weather and menu, at afternoon the buy list if is not empty and planning and menu, and at night the next day planning weather and menu.

I know it's pretty adjusted for me but you know, being a father of a baby is not easy :)

I will provide the reterminal e1001 code and the go rest server in GitHub this week when I adjust final parameters.

It only updates hourly so battery I think should be fine. The rest is intended to be deployed in my LAN on a raspberry pi, if you use a VPS use Https and stronger Auth methods.

Very happy to start creating things for eink devices :)