MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

What a beautiful use of technology to uphold someone's personhood, and let them know they are loved, despite (and with regard to) a profound injury.

This reminds me of a desire I've had for a long time: a simple, wall-mountable eInk device that could be configured with a URL (+wifi creds) and render a markdown file, refreshing once every hour or so. It would be so useful for so many applications – I'm a parish priest and so I could use it to let people know what events are on, if a service is cancelled, the current prayer list, ... the applications would be endless. I'd definitely pay a couple of hundred dollars per device for a solid version of such a thing, if it could be mounted and then recharged every month or two.

assuming your eink display would be on the same LAN as some always-on PC...

  1. install python
  2. make a file named `index.html` somewhere. 
  2a. put this in the "head" tag, so it'll refresh hourly: `<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3600">`.
  3. run `python -m http.server` from the same folder
     This will start a single-threaded web server on 8000
  4. On another machine on your network verify you can pull up http://firstmachine:8000/. 
  5. having proven it works, go buy an e-ink display and point it to http://firstmachine:8000/, make it the default homepage.

Voila.

Any time you have anything to say, just edit the `index.html` file and the eink display will update.

No need for fancy subscription services or kickstarter projects or crowdfunding... just... batteries included python.