How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard
Details
- External ID
- 47056330
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard
- Website domain
- hawksley.org
- Launched
- Feb. 18, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4393530997304582
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I'm proud to share the e-paper family dashboard I've been building over the past decade. I think you might find it interesting. It's open source: https://github.com/joelhawksley/timeframe.
Enrichment
- Theme
- personal and family life organizers
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- family e-paper dashboard
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The web interface and image generation dashboard are standard web dev, but driving physical e-paper displays with custom hardware, power optimization, and firmware is not purely software vibe-coding.
What it would actually take: The stack involves a backend (e.g., Ruby on Rails or Python) running headless Chromium to render HTML/CSS templates into bitmaps, paired with an ESP32 or Raspberry Pi connected to an SPI e-paper panel. The challenging aspects include embedded C/C++ firmware, power management for battery-powered deep sleep, and e-paper waveform refreshing and dithering. This requires physical electronics assembly, hardware debugging, and embedded programming experience.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Home Assistant, SeedStudio Xiao 7.5"
Concerns raised: slow screen refresh rates
Feature requests: forum or community gathering place for ePaper dashboard users
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 20 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #11 of 21 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 100 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Boromlia · ph · 2026-09-14 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- A simple, auto-layout family tree generator · hn · 2026-03-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- Busy Panda - Forever Free Time Tracking · ph · 2026-09-15 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- Ancestree · hn · 2026-08-26 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.32
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Fintech yet.