AI Agent – TRMNL

I've been buying (2 so far) Seeed Studio reTerminal e-ink screens, flashing them with ESPHome, then using Claude Code to write backends to render out whatever I want to put on the screens (a la TRMNL, I also have a TRMNL). Being able to "speak" into existence what I want is pretty freaking awesome.

Note: Yes, I know what I'm about to say could be done using TRMNL (as part of it)

I was able to set it up so that it rotates book quotes every day with a picture of the book cover next to the quote. That, on its own, is far from impressive. What made me giddy was that it shows book quotes that I've highlighted in KOReader on my jailbroken Kindle. KOReader syncs up to BookOrbit (open source ebook manager/reading tracking tool). The whole thing happens 100% local to my network.

BookOrbit is running in a docker, my little server to render the book/quote runs in a docker, my Kindle talks to BookOrbit, my ReTerminal talks to HomeAssistant (ESPHome). It's 100% local and it's silly but it's mine and I love it. As I'm reading I highlight something and a day, a week, a month later I see it on the display on my dresser or in my office.

I want to put these all over the place in my house and I already modified it once so each screen will get a different random quote so I don't have to worry about duplicates. I'm considering getting 1 display per book shelf where I have a full series and configuring it so that it just shows quotes I've highlighted from that series. The sky's the limit.

I fully understand no one cares, I get it, this is super-duper-custom, "just for me", and that's what I love.

Small suggestion on page navigation...

I was not familiar with at TRMNL was and from the link I went to there was no way to get to the "home page" of the product (https://trmnl.com)

I did not see anything in the footer section and clicking on the logo on top only sent me to Help home.

I was trapped with no easy way to learn more about you guys

> How much does it cost to build a plugin?

> We're seeing an average of $1-3 per plugin.

Is this really true, or is it overstated to be safe? Isn't it just a handful of html markup and JS?

Pretty sure there are not 250 countries. How hard is it to validate the enormous number in the header image?

There was a now-flagged comment [0] saying how excited they were until reading the author’s politics. I was curious. The links I found are all offline but sounded unpleasant. This means I can’t say for sure.

I recognize some folk dislike mixing tech and politics, but human ethics and actions impact the world.

It’s fair to feel distrust for any product based on the values that product’s creator expresses.

I saw the author of TRMNL in this thread so perhaps I can invite him to address that — and in replies, let’s keep discourse civil and HN-like please.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48998497

All I see lately is a router to proprietary api, pfff so tired of this. It is lame that this is in the first page and my post shadowbanned. Same circle over and over. Evaluating forum platform change...

I would have one FAQ - does it require 20$ developer license?

[flagged]

It's so disappointing to watch trmnl, a really interesting hardware product concept, transition into being just another AI company.