It’s the TRMNL e-ink display

This is something very appealing to me, as I've been wanting a way to keep out family calendar accesible and visible. I don't know how much faff do I need to go through through

Looks like a big forking faff... Can see the appeal, though!

Amazing that in 2025, there are still devices that can't auto-negotiate between 2.4 and 5GHz for Wifi. Blink cameras used to - and maybe still do?? - have this same problem. So many devices out there don't have problems, so why is this still a thing?

I would love something like this to show my bank balance, but I doubt I could get access to the account to do it anyway.

Bloody Nora. The subject of the email for this post was "It’s TRMNL" Given the recent months of illness, treatment and thankfully recovery I thought OH NO... Its the end. TERMINAL... as in end of the line for Teachmoan, cancer or whatever. Refused to open this email for a week or so. Finally did it and thank god, its another Techmoan video. Mat, looking dapper and good. Bless your work and service to us all. Thanks

You've got WAY more patience than I have! The UX issues on this are the kinds of things that drive me nuts. Glad you were able to get it to function the way you wanted. Hard to believe they couldn't include some optional magnets - particularly since there's a promo image with it on a fridge!

I like that. Are there any instructions with it about how to go about developing plug-ins?

"Hip" product names in all caps and no vowels are a load of BLLCKS imo. It's a neat display, though.

Hello Matt - Great review and it reflects my experience when I purchased mine - Once you have it set up though it is brilliant - My morning information at a glance while it get breakfast - Calendar, weather, etc. - As you say not the sort of product if you want to cycle through many screens but great if you want to stop yourself getting the phone out to check weather or what is in your calendar for the day.

You have a very, err,...interesting week to look forward to! I was just wondering, does your wife have you insured?😀

Thank you Mat! Interesting device not quite ready for prime time. I can think of multiple uses but the work required to use it seems excessie.

"Don't buy this!" - I see, you're obviously sponsored by anticapitalists now. This is exactly the kind of device I like watching a demonstration of because it looks neat and interesting. After 10 minutes I've seen enough of it. Does it do anything meaningful my smartphone doesn't already do better, more flexible and convenient? No. Also a this low resolution, the e-ink display doesn't look very attractive.

I have a feeling that one of the UK mobile phone companies (O2?) did an LCD based device that did something similar I think it was called the Joggler or something like that. Oh, here we go, it was calendar only… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_Joggler

Thanks for the video, Mat. I'd heard about these on the Accidental Tech Podcast but hadn't seen one. For me this falls, as so many things do, into, the category of "Oooh, I'd quite like to have a play around with that but I know that, truthfully, I'd never actually use it for anything". Nice to see it in action, though. Is it possible to change that horrible date format your calendar showed, or does even that require forking?

Nice little video that, Matt. A device definitely not made for me, but definitely interesting to watch nevertheless! Always good to see what is out there 🙂 Cheers, Lee

Very nicely done video. This is a 1000% upgrade to The Message Machine: https://youtu.be/w1lG2xe5WAw 😂 It's a handy item although I agree with all of the pros and cons you mentioned. Speaking of Paperwhite, you've reminded me I need to recharge my Kindle and start reading things with it again. Having the Kindle app on my phone gives me the lazy excuse to neglect the Kindle even though it's easier for reading outside. I wish I had more to say about this other than "nice video" ..so now I'll get back to adding my own wild and impossible pretend events to my calendar. 😉 Take care 🤍

I only found today that it can't handle a hidden SSID and even if you unhide it you have to re-pair it.

Thanks for this Mat, appreciated. Regards

Good review Mat. Well done on getting it to wok for you. I'll be following your advice and not buying one :-).

Would love to see an actually useful e-ink monitor at a reasonable price. Would be great for working remote on a laptop.

That got me thinking about if anyone has yet done an e-ink photo frame yet and they do, would be interested to try one of those.

Thank you for giving a brilliant review. Too hard for me to control, though… And a side note, I couldn’t help but notice your hometown, Skelmersdale. Who would name a community that?, (said the man who lives in Ballville Township).

You're spoiling us with another video!

Better software and this is a hit

In moments like these I'm glad that I'm not a native English speaker. It saved me from having the same freakout as many of the folks around here, since the only thought I had when reading the title was: "The heck's a Trumnul?"

The display looked a lot “fuzzier” than I would have expected, especially things like the large “current temperature” digits (a balmy 26 in Skelmersdale at time of filming). After a bit of digging on their site it looks like it’s 800x480 resolution (on the 7.5in screen), although they don’t exactly shout about it. I imagine for many, possibly most, use cases it doesn’t matter and most users will be totally unbothered by it. It’d really bother me though, I love a clear, crisp display, like you get on even the cheapest modern e-reader.

I thought … oh nvr mnd. Thank god I don’t want one.

Will you be wearing your new wingsuit to the Disco Dance Party? Sounds like it will be a blast!😉 This does look like a device I could use. But still costs more than I care to pay at the moment and of course, you told us not to buy it.

03:14 They also had a server outage a few weeks about, but only me noticed as it was 2am. I use traintimes.org.uk and www.leddepartureboard.com to get my railway fix. I found Ryan at Terml very helpful in getting stuff working. I have a few of these around the house as they kindly send me some to hand out to people. I've made similar with a EPS32 and an E ink display or old kindles that we transform into vandal resistant bus stops shat show books and poems

Your local weather is the same name as the road I live in, and can you please give us the results of the dancing competition please 😂

Scaring us all there Mat

Oh thanks Mat. As a Patreon subscriber, we know when our demise might happen. 30 days from the date this video was filmed 😅

Flippin Eck…you gave me a right scare there with the original title.

As a developer, IMO I think this is good feedback for them. Seeing that first error message I was like yeah, you could have better handling of that to explain where to get help, saying you have “malformed content” isn’t actionable, it’s a dev thing. Then seeing it said “Fork” and yeah, they probably needed to talk to people outside their circle more when designing it. Using developer jargon isn’t bad in itself if it’s intended for developers, but if you need to use it to edit an area code, then you either need to change stuff around or give the name a rethink.

Bld bstrd! ;-)

Jesus, my heart stopped for a second then.

I was notified by email with the original post title and was terrified. I've never been so happy to see an e-ink display

My god. The most crazy inadvertent clickbait ever! 😂 My heart skipped about 20 beats!

Title aside, which my brain didn't pick up on at first glance - I am looking forward to the wingsuit review. 😜

Heart attack inducing for sure in the email and push notification. I am glad it wasn't what I thought it was ;)

Omfg

Oh man, don't do that!

"More pretend stuff", sky diving, nice see you not lost your sense of humour, classic techmoan

Oooh this is an area I've been looking into. I want a dashboard and an trying desktop ones and considering tablets, Pis, eink displays and can't work out what to do. I'll watch with interest. Oh and I love the gallows humour.

Please don’t do click bait after your diagnosis!

Dammit, Mat! That title...

Yikes this made my heart race.

Some classic Techmoan dark humor

When I read the title as "it's terminal", you scared me. 😥

Jeez, what a Title after your recent health scare!