This E Ink Productivity Dashboard Was Built in a Week

When people lament the realities of modern life, what they’re actually upset with is complexity. We didn’t evolve to handle the constant mental burden of work schedules, massive social networks, yearly tax calculations, or grocery shopping lists. It all adds up and feels overwhelming. But the world isn’t going to revert to the pre-agricultural state we evolved within, which is why many use their big human brains to create tools that reduce some of the mental load. For example, Max Blade built this useful E Ink dashboard and he managed it in just a week.

Why a week? Well, Blade is a relatively new YouTuber and just recently got his first sponsorship offer. That’s an exciting moment in every YouTuber’s journey, but it came with a tight deadline. To take advantage of the offer, Blad had to get this project done in a week.

This is a “dashboard” with an E Ink screen. It has several functions and cycles through slides that display desired data. One slide, for example, shows Blade’s revenue through Stripe — a payment processing platform popular with independent sellers and small businesses. Another slide provides a visual indicator of how much of Blade’s life has elapsed. That’s a bit morbid, but it can certainly create some motivation to live life to the fullest. In the future, Blade can add more slides that display any information accessible through an online API.

Because Blade only had a week to complete the project, he kept the design and BOM simple. The only two electronic components are an ESP32-based development board and a 7.5” monochrome E Ink screen. There is also a power supply, though this could run for a long time on battery power, since E Ink screens consume very little power.

Those two components fit into a minimalist 3D-printed frame intended to sit on a desk. Blade modeled that in Shapr3D and first printed a test part in boring black filament. Because that was boring, he switched filament for the final version. That is a nice purple color that Blade chose because it reminded him of Nintendo’s iconic “Atomic Purple” consoles made in the late ‘90s.

Blade brushes over the code and so we don’t have details on that, though it is pretty safe to assume he used either the Arduino IDE, CircuitPython, or MicroPython. Whatever the case, the resulting slides look nice in an understated kind of way and Blade was able to get the project done in time to secure his first sponsorship.