// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
So I have a weatherman, which also tells me the news
The summers in my region are quite dry, hot & rather unbearable. So, to get some refuge from all of this, I wanted to try out a few different measures, which would effectively reduce the temperature of my house. I thought a good starting point for this would be to establish a baseline and find out the standard deviation. To do this, I realized I’d need to observe the temperature & humidity of my house for a certain duration.
At the same time I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of content recommended to me by algorithms on social media, especially YouTube, Instagram & Reddit. Hacker News, with its rather transparent algorithm and RSS feeds of the authors I like seemed like a good start to take control of the content I consume, which is why I had set up miniflux, and it’s been going well. It’s just that I tend to miss some of the cutting edge stuff which appears regularly on HN. Especially with the AI/LLM stuff.
Also, I am interested in astronomical events like occultation of certain stars & planets by the moon or eclipses, etc., so that I can decide whether I can try to observe those with my telescope. Which is also related to my interest in knowing the air quality around my house.
While I was thinking this, I realized that I had an e-paper display that’s sitting in the electronics basket at the corner of my room, collecting dust. One fine day, I decided to use Claude Code to finally build something for it, and use it as a static display which serves things I mentioned above.
I had bought it from hubtronics.in a couple of years back, when I was working on a project which involved embedded programming on STM32/MC60. It’s the T5 e-Paper module from LILYGO. It has an ESP32 chip integrated, which supports WiFi & Bluetooth.
So, next question was how do I project this data on the display. The structure, form of the content, and what pieces of it need to grab my attention the most.
I started way too unstructured, and was caught off guard quickly. I hadn’t given any attention to the layout, and ended up printing everything as a single left aligned blob of text.
It was quite ugly, and I didn’t even click a picture of it.
I decided to start with a simple design. It consisted of an HTTP server, which would collect all the feeds from external APIs, and serve it over HTTP as a JSON. This JSON, with a fixed schema/contract would be rendered by ESP32. ESP32 will periodically refresh the screen, after a successful API call to the server.
Then I prompted Claude to come up with a grid of 2x3 (height x width) and it quickly came up with a good enough render.