February 22, 2026
When your ‘low tech’ costs Tesla money
I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard
Reddit loses it over $2,000 ‘low‑tech’ family screen dream
TLDR: A developer spent years building a calm, non-glowing family info screen using pricey e‑paper displays, turning his house into a custom smart dashboard. The internet loves the concept but roasts the $2,000 screen cost, with many saying a whiteboard or glass panel does the same job for pocket change.
A wholesome story about a couple wanting fewer glowing screens in their home just turned into a full-blown internet roast session over a $2,000 e‑paper calendar. The inventor spent a decade building a calm, paper‑like digital dashboard for his family’s schedule and weather, only for commenters to ask: why not just buy a whiteboard? One top reply proudly flexes their “ancient tech” solution: a big sheet of glass, dry‑erase markers, and a shopping list. Suddenly the high‑end smart home looks like it got body‑checked by a $20 hardware store hack.
The biggest drama? That price tag. People love the idea of a screen that doesn’t glow or distract, but the moment they see the cost, the mood flips from “take my money” to “this is for tech billionaires only.” Others pile on the irony: he wanted a “healthy relationship with technology”… then wired his whole house with timers, sensors, and displays. One commenter jokes that you don’t need a fancy dashboard to know when your laundry is done — you’ve used the washing machine before. There’s also a geeky side‑quest where users complain that patents and locked‑down hardware keep e‑paper prices sky‑high. In classic internet fashion, a heartfelt home project became a battlefield between minimalists, tinkerers, and folks who swear a $5 notepad still wins.
Key Points
- •The author spent about a decade developing “Timeframe,” a family dashboard that aggregates calendar, weather, and smart-home data for use in their home.
- •Early prototypes using an LCD-based Magic Mirror and later OLED screens were readable but too bright and distracting in various lighting conditions.
- •Jailbroken Kindle e-readers proved e-paper’s suitability for the dashboard, driven by a Ruby on Rails backend pulling data from Google Calendar and Dark Sky and rendering PNGs via IMGKit.
- •A more robust system used Visionect e-paper displays of multiple sizes, powered by a locally hosted Visionect backend on a Raspberry Pi, updating images via a custom visionect-ruby integration.
- •A 2019 pilot with a potential customer showed the hardware and new Visionect per-device fees would require high up-front and subscription costs, and by late 2021 the Marshall Fire destroyed the author’s home, coinciding with the emergence of Boox’s high-resolution Mira Pro e-paper monitor.