Robert Poser
The Hardware
Generally the idea is to integrate a small ePaper display as good as possible into a desk frame to let the user not recognise that there is a display hidden inside a picture (this is possible since ePapers displays have no backlight and are reflective like paper). Obviously this also means that we need to hide the driver electronics including Particle's Photon MCU silently inside the desk frame ;-) Check out the #Paperino project for details.
The actual picture is printed on transparent (copy shop) foil and can be easily changed by your favourite image!
The Software
Particle Photon allows easy triggering of events via IFTTT. However, for this example I used an approach based on this nice example of a Google script: It returns the number of unread GMail emails in my account. All we have to to is to create a webhook based on the obtained URL and update the screen every time when there is a new state status observed. That's it!
Another use case: SPOTIFY frontend
Wondering who this nice song currently running at Spotify is singing? My initial intention was to continuously show the interpreter and song title in a nice way at the desk frame. Since recently this can be polled too based on webhooks, see here more. However my time and abilities are limited ... just leave it here as a nudge:
Salah
Mike Szczys
John