Tablero

Raspberry pi + eInk display
Closeup of dashboard
Calendar widget
Picture widget
News widget
Note widget
Weather widget
Todo widget

Inspiration

As developers, we spend most of our day staring at bright crowded displays to get the information that we need, which can be tiring and induce headaches. The advantage of eInk displays is that they don't emit any light, instead they reflect ambient light which results in a very natural and paper like display. We saw this and wanted to use these displays to present information such as the news, notes, todo lists, the weather, etc. so that we don't have to spend even more time looking at bright screens.

What it does

Tablero is a Raspberry Pi connected to an eInk screen, which displays a grid of widgets allowing you to view, at a glance, all the information that is most important to you.

How we built it

First we set up a Google Firestore Collection to store users and their dashboard data, this is accessed via Google Cloud Functions by the Raspberry Pi which then uses it to display the relevant data on the eInk screen. Lastly, we setup a React Web App to allow users to edit their Tablero dashboard.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we faced was setting up the drag and drop functionality within the React Web App. The library we used was fairly basic and we found it very confusing even after looking at many examples. It took us serveral hours just to be able to drag widgets around.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Usually with hackathons it is difficult to finalise our projects due to the extremly short timeframe, however we are very happy that we managed to complete an end to end and relatively bug free solution. We are also proud of the breadth of technologies we managed to incorporate from IoT to cloud computing to a web app.

What we learned

Working with an eInk screen required us to think differently about how to display visual elements, as you can only use grayscale colors and refresh the screen a handful of times a minute. As web developers, we had to write code which was different to our usual way of implementing a user interface, which put us out of our comfort zone and was a great learning experience.

What's next for Tablero

We feel like we have a good base product implemented, however there are literally endless new widgets that can be added to Tablero, this would be very easy to do as our system has a modular design. A few ideas we have for future widgets are top tweets of the day, stock market data, and a widget that displays your calendar. Equally implementing a marketplace where individuals can create and share their own widgets would be a great feature to add.