Building a Real-Time HN Display for $15
medium.comIt's a great fun project but...
There isn't much of a difference between this and having all notifications enabled.
Yes it's a separate screen but you'll put it where you can see it while working or there is no point in it. And then it will distract you.
I love this because it uses UDP _and_ a CYD (Cheap Yellow Display, which is what we hardware nerds have taken to calling these). I have two or three of these around, one as a 3D printer remote, another as a pseudo logic analyzer, and a caseless one that I use as a Micro Python sandbox.
I've been using UDP to send CPU stats for my machines for ages (https://github.com/rcarmo/raspi-cluster/blob/master/tools/se... is a good example), and in modern networks it has become very much reliable (99.99% so on a LAN). Keeping an eye out for UDP on an ESP32 and running Wireguard might be a little power intensive to ever get this running on battery even if it had an e-paper display, though.
Nice project. The $15 price point is genuinely impressive for something like this.
I've been curious about e-ink displays for a while but haven't taken the plunge. What's the refresh rate like in practice? And does it actually help you notice interesting posts you'd otherwise miss, or is it more of a fun desk decoration?
The refresh rate must be something like 20fps when scrolling the text of long posts. I’m not sure and haven’t measured.
While I’m working I glance at it from time to time and get a sense of the wide breadth of conversations going on at any moment.
Satisfying to see all the payload request and response sizes in bytes not kb.
Q: the display just starts at 0 and increments comment id by 1 every 10 seconds. Has the device caught up to latest? If you power cycle it, do you have to run through all historical comments?
The zero is just a magic number to indicate grab the newest. So it’s just showing the most recent comments.
Why not using MQTT? A Lambda that fetch new comments from HN, parse them into Markdown and push into MQTT; the ESP only needs to subscribes a topic on MQTT and render the messages.
This is awesome. I've been meaning to check out WireGuard for some time, and this project has been inspiring for me. Thanks!