A decade-long home technology project called Timeframe shows how one family moved from conventional screens to an e-paper dashboard combining calendars, weather information and smart-home status. Creator Joel Hawksley described the system as an attempt to retain useful ambient information while limiting the prominence of phones and glowing displays inside the home.
The project began after Hawksley and his wife decided to keep screens out of their bedroom and charge devices elsewhere overnight. They still wanted ready access to forecasts and schedules. An early “Magic Mirror,” assembled from a medicine cabinet and a stripped-down LCD, displayed both, but its text was difficult to read in bright Colorado daylight and its backlight remained conspicuous after dark.
Hawksley next experimented for about a year with jailbroken Kindles. A pair of the e-readers showed calendar and weather data, refreshing every half-hour because each update took several seconds and produced the characteristic e-ink flash. He built wooden cases at a library makerspace. Behind the displays, a Ruby on Rails application retrieved information from Google Calendar and Dark Sky, rendered pages as PNG images with IMGKit, and served them when the Kindles woke on schedule.
Seeking greater reliability, Hawksley adopted commercial Visionect e-paper units. The available sizes ranged from 6 to 32 inches; he found the smaller high-pixel-density panels more suitable than the lower-resolution 32-inch model. His eventual arrangement placed a 6-inch weather screen in the mudroom, a magnet-backed 13-inch panel on the kitchen refrigerator and a 10-inch unit in the bedroom. He hosted Visionect’s closed-source backend locally on the Raspberry Pi already running Rails and pushed fresh images every five minutes. He said that configuration could operate for months without a failure.
Turning the idea into a consumer product proved less viable. In a 2019 test, a prospective customer did not see enough value in a 13-inch device costing about $1,000. Visionect later introduced a $7 monthly charge per device for locally hosted backend software, which Hawksley estimated would force a service price of at least $10 per screen each month.
The project changed again after the 2021 Marshall Fire destroyed the family home along with about 1,000 others. During the rebuilding period, Hawksley tested Boox’s 25.3-inch Mira Pro. Unlike the battery-powered panels, it needed mains power and an HDMI source, but offered a large, high-resolution surface that could update in real time. The rebuilt home included a dedicated display nook and powered locations for two additional Visionect screens.
Real-time operation prompted a substantial backend simplification. Two-second long polling exposed performance limits, so the system stopped generating images for Visionect and began rendering a URL directly. Home Assistant increasingly became the main source for Google Calendar, Apple Weather and Sonos data. That transition allowed Hawksley to remove more than half the application code, along with its database and Redis. Background work moved to Rufus Scheduler, while Rails’ file-store cache retained fetched results.
Timeframe also began treating its display corner as a household status panel. Home Assistant sensors could surface information such as open or unlocked doors. Hawksley described adding a dishwasher reminder from a smart outlet’s power reading in roughly a minute, without changing or redeploying the Rails application—an example of the flexibility gained by shifting automation logic into the home platform.
