An idea that I had when my girlfriend and I were doing long-distance. I wanted some of our thoughtful messages to live in our physical space rather than just on our phones.

It’s a little frame that sits in her home. I can send photos, handwritten notes, drawings, etc. to it on the phone from anywhere, and they appear on the screen. I went with e-ink because it feels more like leaving them a note on their desk, and my girlfriend doesn’t have to turn it off at night! We’re now living in the same city but I’ve decided to build it anyway.

My background is mostly in software engineering and ML, so Claude has definitely helped a lot in getting the end-to-end prototype working!

Current setup:

Waveshare 7.5-inch e-ink display

Waveshare ESP32 e-paper driver board

Server hosted on a Cloud VM

Web app for sending drawings, notes and photos

A simple 3D-printed enclosure

All rendering is done on server; the ESP32 connects over wifi, polls for updates every X seconds, and downloads and displays the new image when…