r/trmnl

I thought it would be fun to share some of my experience with the terminal X, specifically around the ease with which I was able to integrate it into an existing setup.

I created a set of five custom plugins covering things like:

• AI-powered daily briefings and tasks / messaging / calendar triage
• my personal health metrics
• status of my smart home
• personalised weather forecast

I had pre-existing infrastructure (somewhat cheekily called RafeOS), which is really, a set of tools, APIs, data, and second brain context that I was already using in my personal AI/agentic setup. For various reasons, I opted to use the webhook approach to get data into the TRMNL platform and then used the framework and design system to get to what I thought was good-looking screens in a very short amount of time. Not quite at the level of quality that I see in some of the plug-ins being featured here, but still very satisfying for me personally.

So right now my TRMNL X is cycling through screens from RafeOS, a personal ecosystem / agentic system I've been experimenting with this year. It shows an AI-powered daily briefing ("get moving Rafe"), my latest health metrics ("also get moving Rafe"), the status of my smart flat ("it's hot everywhere and the windows are open"), current and forecast weather ("it's hot now and tomorrow"), and so on (the current UK heatwave is not helping with differentiated testing conditions).

What's interesting for me is that it has become another surface, one that I've used more than I expected. I really like the passive glance use case, complementing what comes up on my laptop, my phone, wall tablet etc. and pleasingly, it means I've spent a little less time looking at other screens, which is never a bad thing. For what it's worth, the things that have been most useful to me have been smart home information, health trends / scores, and live weather. I think that's because the daily briefing comes up on other services, whether that's in a smartphone app or delivered via email or messaging.

I was able to pick up the TRMNL platform very easily, thanks to the quality of the platform, tooling, and documentation. Being transparent, I used AI (a combination of Claude and Codex) to do a lot of the work for me. I was particularly impressed by the agent friendliness of both the documentation and the tooling, which meant I was able to go from nothing to a five-screen set of custom plugins and scheduled updates in a handful of hours. That's testament to both the platform itself and what you can do with directed AI building / development. That said, it's obviously helpful to have some pre-existing technical product and design skills because it enables you to have a certain amount of rigour and make sensible choices. It really is a good example of where the value of judgement comes in an AI-assisted world.

I've had no problems with the hardware, which I'm very happy about, having read some of the other posts on Reddit. I did get caught out by the UK custom thing. Overall, I've been really impressed with the experience and the quality of the hardware. I wasn't completely convinced by the puck and the magnets, but in day-to-day use, but it did make it easy to get mounted on the wall, so I guess what I'd say is when it works, it works really well.

I've written up some of my early experience here: https://rafeblandford.com/e-ink-screen-on-the-wall-trmnl-x/ and here https://rafeblandford.com/developer-experience-trmnl/

My TRMNL X pointed at a self-hosted BYOS instead of the cloud. The dashboard is system stats for the box that hosts everything, pulled from Glances: CPU, memory, disk, temp, per-core load, and every container ranked by resident memory. GitHub commit activity down the right.

The server is something I built called Tesserae. You compose dashboards in a browser, it renders the frame headless and pushes the image to the panel, so the TRMNL just paints a bitmap as usual. Point the device's BYOS URL at it and you're done.

The other two panels are running off the same server: an Xteink X4 showing a Pokedex, and a 4.2" PicPak showing a picture of my cat Ada. Three different panel families, three resolutions, and the PicPak is four-colour while the TRMNL X is grayscale. That was the reason I wrote it rather than using an existing BYOS. One place to build dashboards, whatever the panel is.

AGPL-3.0, Docker Compose or a Home Assistant app.

https://github.com/dmellok/tesserae

One month ago I shared a look at HubbyCal, my first ever TRMNL plugin.
After a lot of work, LOTS of messages with support (superstars), and lots of pain and tears, HubbyCal is finally here and public for everyone!

HubbyCal is your simple and clean daily dashboard that shows you your entire day in one place as well as:

• Weather Information
  • Current condition
  • High and Low
  • Weather Alerts
• Holidays and Birthdays
• Custom countdowns to a specific day
• A dedicated section to showing up to 2 work events
• Garbage and Recycling day reminders
• A customized reminder for a weekly reoccurring event
• Up to 12 events, personalized with
  • Custom Avatars
  • Colors (so much grey!)
• A dedicated "Spotlight" calendar section at the bottom where you can spotlight any kind of event you'd like. I use mine to show my dinner calendar but the possibilities are endless
• Days without events show a different quote and every refresh

(Designed around TRMNL X so some features like custom reminders and total event counts may differ on other devices)

HubbyCal is now live and ready to go for anyone interested in simplifying your day.

An iOS version is coming soon (full calendar app) so keep your eyes peeled.

If you try it, please share your feedback. I'd really appreciate it.

The kids are playing in the pool and in other areas of the country the firefighters struggle to put wildfires out. I’m confused?

Context:
I have no idea what I'm doing. This is my first app/plugin. I have only ever run a couple of plugins on my TRMNL which arrived about 2 weeks ago. And I only signed up to Base44 for app building about 1 week ago. I also had zero intent to share it with others, however, it may be useful for some with similar needs.

Here's something I've been working on for a week or so. And by working on, I mean typing prompts in Base44. No idea what the overall feeling around AI is in this community, but here we are.

I'm open to any feedback/suggestions: Does anything here stand out as an obvious design flaw? Or something I'm over-thinking or not considering? I know I tend to have an overly complex idea in mind when starting projects and get tunnel vision, while an obvious easier solution is staring me iun the face.

Basic idea:
I've got ADHD and needed a simple list I could edit from anywhere so random thoughts at work had a chance to become tasks completed at home hours later. But I can't use a phone at work, I don't want to pay for a solution that's not perfect for my needs, and I have used apps/websites in the past, and I know I will never rememeber to actively open them and check them.

Anyway, here's what I've put together to meet my fairly specific desires.

Features:
-Simple/Clean output with multiple categorgies for lists.

-No sing-up or account. Just create a list and have the generated list ID and your chosen password is all you need.

-Email CAN be used to create a list and have a recovery code sent, but no email's needed to use it.

-Add tasks from phone or PC via an in-browser app.

-Choose between a few different fonts, font sizes, up to 5 categories (columns), choose background and font colour/shade options for List title, Categories and list items.

-Other users can request to add to the list once, or to be a contributor by scanning the QR code.

-You can also send an invite to others, and choose what permissions they have with an access code.

Current problems:
- The current solution is not really a new plugion at all. This is the basic Image Display plugin, pulling an image of my list which this web app publishes to a given URL every time there's a change to the list. Well, it SHOULD do that. What it ACTUALLY does is creates some completely new table/spredsheet with slightly different formatting, font and spacing and then seems to export and image of that table. I've currently got it set up in a way that the font size I've chosen ends up looking fine when it gets to the display, but if someone else wanted to use a different font size, I have a feeling the end of each line would be cut off. The current easy fix is just to disable font changes, but I want it to be as customizable as possible.
This is less of a TRMNL issue, and more of a "I have no idea how to export the pixel-for-pixel image that I'm looking at in my app automatically to our set URL" issue.

- The next issue I have, and I suspect it's something I could solve if I paid for some kind of TRMNL license, is that the image exports from the app as soon as there's a change, and my TRMNL device pulls the image from TRMNL every 15 minutes, BUT the image TRMNL pulls from the app-generated URL is only updating once per hour.

-There are also plenty of functions I've tried to add but am yet to test.

A Little more background on what I was aiming for with this:
I have many lists in many notebooks but I often leave them at home or at work, or just lose them. So having one list I could update from anywhere was the goal. I also work in Defence and can't bring my phone into my office. So it had to be editable from my browser. And TRMNL made the most sense, because I also need it on a screen that's always on and always in front of me, otherwise I'll never think to check it. I also wanted my wife to be able to add tasks to it (these should be displayed slightly differently and I've just realised that needs to be tested still).
I initially made it only for myself, but I think it's pretty cool, so maybe others will like it too. Regardless, I made sure it didn't require any kind of sign in or handing over information.

Wow this was long. I hopew someone reads it.

Hello everyone!

My TV WALL TRMNL recipe has just been approved (based on TMDB Trending TV Shows of the week).

https://trmnl.com/recipes/397259

I open-sourced the layout and the scripts if anyone else is in the Garmin ecosystem and wants to set it up!

https://github.com/Jay9185/TRMNL\_Garmin\_cirqa.git

Hello everyone! My TRMNL plugin that displays Place of the Day from Atlas Obscura just got published.

https://trmnl.com/recipes/396344

Never heard of Atlas Obscura? Neither do I before I started some research for another plugin and this website came out. They have a very tasteful selection of places around the world that are usually more on the niche side. But that makes most of them really interesting and charming (and less touristy). As their tagline says: Atlas Obscura is a definitive guidebook and friendly tour-guide to the world's most wondrous places.

They pick one place every day so it is a nice way to discover not so popular landmarks around the globe and I guarantee you that shortly you will have a few new travel tips noted :).

If you prefer quieter screen you can hide the QR code or title bar in the settings.

Hello!

I had a ~12 year old Kindle 4 laying around and decided to try to convert it to a TRMNL device. I have deployed a local LaraPaper instance and started playing with it.

After jailbreaking and installing KOReader I was greatly disappointed in the battery life of the thing (~1 day) as well as hacks required to stop the screensaver from kicking in (magical strings typed into the Kindle search bar... wow). KOReader runs on Lua, so I guess it is not that surprising in the end.

So, I decided to go lower and try the TRMNL-kindle way, which uses a shell script launched from KUAL. Note that very recently it merged some changes which puts the device into a proper sleep, so it looked quite promising.

It did not work, of course. My Kindle being old and special. The screen just turned blank. Enabling debugging did nothing. But I was too invested at this point. I got the SSH server working on the device and started peeking under the hood through the terminal.

Turned out that my version of Kindle handled the screen redrawing command a bit differently, making it not compatible with the script. Easy to fix. Then it turned out that my LaraPaper instance is serving escaped image paths, that were breaking image download. Then WiFi was mishandled. Then battery reporting. Airplane mode...

2 evenings later I had it finally working, but it kept freezing after a couple of hours or so. I think this was KUAL launcher being garbage collected by the Kindle OS or sth. So I moved to manually starting it from console in a detached state.

Aaaaand, I think it works, finally? It is working for the last ~20h uninterrupted.

It seems to drain ~15% of battery per day, when polling every 20 minutes. And this is the original Kindle battery. I think I should easily get it working over a week on a single charge. If I go lower on the refresh period, maybe 2 weeks are doable too!

I know it looks a bit baffling compared to the real TRMNL battery life, but I spend zero dollars and had a lot of fun. Now, planning to 3D print and enclosure for it.

BTW, this new hardware sleep code has a nice side effect of introducing "refresh on wake up" feature that someone was previosly posting about on this subreddit before.

EDIT: it seems that it still just crashes the process from time to time :( . Need to debug it more, I am afraid