The big TRMNL ePaper screen has a new job for now: it wakes up, fetches a dashboard frame from my DietPi box, shows it, and goes quiet again.
That sounds more responsible than it really is.
What I like about this setup is not that it turned into a dashboard. It is that it can turn into a dashboard without becoming trapped there. A while ago this same screen was mostly a TXT reader and a Wi-Fi image toy. Now it can also be a calm little server panel. Next week it can become something else again.
The useful part is simple enough: the Orange Pi renders the whole 800x480 frame server-side, and the screen just pulls a ready-made image. That keeps the firmware smaller, makes layout changes easy, and is kinder to the battery than trying to do more work on the ESP32 itself.
The fun part is that once it works, I immediately want to keep rearranging it.
I already found myself nudging the typography, making the small labels bolder, and rethinking which information belongs in the “system” block and which belongs in the big metric cards. ePaper is very honest about weak visual hierarchy, which is annoying for about five minutes and then turns into a very good reason to keep refining the layout.
There were also a few predictable little failures on the way:
- the screen briefly preferred a broken cached frame over a fresh dashboard
- one of the test Wi-Fi networks turned out to be
5 GHz, which was excellent for the router and completely useless for the ESP32 - some image formats were technically supported and still managed to be annoying in practice
- the first locally rendered preview looked worse than the real device because it was missing the live system data entirely
That all feels correct for a project like this.
The screen is useful now, but it is still mostly a toy in the best sense: adjustable, reversible, and open to being repurposed whenever a different idea seems more entertaining. Today it shows a DietPi dashboard. Tomorrow it can go back to books, pictures, or something stranger.
That is still enough of a plan.