HardyMornings

What it does

A 7.3-inch colour e-ink frame sits where everyone passes in the morning. It shows the date, the weather in Brussels with a rain badge, each child’s activities with a pictogram and a time, a yellow band for what to prepare for tomorrow, and five headlines from RTBF. When a European summit is near, a banner says so, because in Brussels a summit day is not an ordinary day.

It changes once a day and is otherwise completely still. That is the feature.

Designed for a reader who cannot read yet

Each child has a colour chip, and each activity has a pictogram. The times are large. A five-colour panel leaves no room for decoration, so the layout is a plain grid, on purpose. There is no generated artwork.

How it is made

• HTML, then a photograph of it. The board is an ordinary web page. Chromium renders it at four times the panel’s resolution, and each block of sixteen pixels then votes for one of the panel’s five colours. The frame paints the result without dithering, so text stays sharp.
• Measured colours. The palette holds what the panel really shows, not what the datasheet promises. Green is banned because on this panel it is nearly black. A test lints the stylesheet for anything outside the palette.
• Layouts that cannot overflow quietly. Every zone is named, and the tests render the worst cases, long headlines and many reminders, and fail if any zone spills.
• A frame that sleeps. The frame wakes at six, asks whether the image changed, and goes back to sleep. The server retries a failed weather or news source on its own until just before then.
• At home, on a small box. It runs in a rootless container on a mini PC under the TV. Nothing leaves the house except the requests for weather and news.

Worth noticing

Changes come from family feedback, checked on the real panel. The first round brought four: an activity that had moved, end times, a better news source, and a weather icon that disagreed with the rain badge.