Timeframe: after a decade of e-paper builds, a home dashboard where blank means healthy

When Joel Hawksley and his wife Caitlin married, they set an intention to have a healthy relationship with technology at home, keeping their bedroom free of screens — but they missed their calendar and weather apps. His first solution, a Magic Mirror built into a medicine cabinet, was hard to read in daylight and glowed at night, so he spent about a year with jailbroken Kindles and settled on e-paper as the right medium: unobtrusive in any lighting.

Reliability came from Visionect displays that updated every few minutes for months on a charge, driven by a Ruby on Rails backend pushing PNG images. A first customer pilot failed in 2019 — the 13-inch hardware alone would have cost $1,000 — and then the late-2021 Marshall Fire destroyed the family home. Rebuilding from scratch let Hawksley design the displays into the architecture: a "phone nook" with an art light for a 25.3-inch Boox Mira Pro that updates in real time, plus power runs for smaller screens.

The real-time Boox forced a backend overhaul: Hawksley migrated data fetching into Home Assistant, which removed over half the code, and turned the top-left corner of each display into a status indicator. Template sensors write icon,label lines for open doors, laundry that needs changing or a dishwasher reminder; if the corner is blank, the house is healthy and needs no attention. Only relevant information appears at a given moment, and control of devices is separated from display of their status.

The write-up of the ten-year build went up on February 17, 2026 and drew a Hacker News thread scoring 1,616 points with 369 comments. Hawksley says he continues to receive significant interest and remains focused on bringing Timeframe to market as a Home Assistant add-on, while the hardware cost — roughly $2,000 for the large Boox display — and embedded-system hardening remain open problems.