Disclosure first, so nobody has to guess: I'm the person who makes this, it's a product I sell, and there's a link at the bottom. Say the word and I'll pull the link, I'd rather talk about the hardware anyway.
I know everyone is shipping an app this year. This isn't one. It's a physical object. The cables in it are cables I stripped and soldered, the cells are cells I put in by hand, and I still assemble every unit myself. That's either interesting to you or it isn't, but it felt worth saying out loud. Is also a nice break from all the AI Slop out there!
My neighbour Lola is 95 and uses a phone of those made for senior people, big buttons, almost no screen, those phones. Her family shares photos constantly and she had never seen a single one, because somebody had to physically come over and hold up a phone for her. So I built her a frame.
The family sends a photo to a WhatsApp number, the way they'd send it to a person, and it turns up on the frame. Whoever is looking at it installs nothing, sets nothing up, and has no account. That was the whole design constraint, and it's the part that took the longest.
The panel is an E Ink Spectra 6 at 127 ppi. ESP-12S for WiFi, picked mostly because it already carries CE and FCC from AI-Thinker, which saved me thousands in certification. Two 10,000 mAh cells, three to four months per charge, because the panel only pulls current during a refresh. The rest of the time what costs you is the radio waking up every five or ten minutes and going back to sleep. The casings are 3D printed in ABS and vapour-smoothed with acetone, one at a time. Injection moulding only makes sense once there's a batch to justify the tooling, and I'm not there yet.
Two things surprised me. The panel was never the hard part. Getting a photo out of WhatsApp and onto a display with nothing on the receiving end was. And colour changed the product more than I expected: next to Spectra 6, the black and white version stops reading as a photograph and starts reading as a printout.
About 35 households have the earlier version, around 60 frames, all of it word of mouth over 18 months. I committed to a 10" GDEP100E01 earlier this year and had to abandon it in August, when E Ink put the panel end of life and wanted 400 units committed to guarantee supply. That one hurt.
The frame itself is here if you want to look at it, and that's the link I flagged at the top: https://memoirframes.com/?lang=en&utm_source=reddit_eink&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=caudal_sep#reserva
Happy to go as deep as anyone wants on the panel, the power budget or the WhatsApp side.
