Build a daily e-ink newspaper display from Home Assistant data

The poster, u/Commercial-Ad-2614, had collected plenty of data in Home Assistant but had never built an automation with it. They bought a Seeed E1004 colour e-ink frame and wanted a single page, styled like an old newspaper, that would show whether their London commuter train was on time, the Jubilee line status and the day's weather before they left the house. After getting stuck on their own, they turned to Claude to help build it. The result is a Python script, run by a Home Assistant automation once a day, that renders the page as a flat JPEG and converts it to the frame's six-colour palette. The frame wakes, pulls the image and goes back into deep sleep to save battery.

Claude got them to a working prototype, which they then themed as a Victorian newspaper and later as a 1950s magazine cover. A third, Star Wars themed layout was harder: the poster says the AI tools they tried refused to help because of the copyrighted material, so they designed that one by hand. The post drew over 500 upvotes. No time or cost figures are given.

The six-colour panel cannot blend colours, so images need dithering; another owner of a similar Seeed frame said their colours came out disappointing. Commenters pointed to Tesserae, an existing e-ink platform, as a way to skip building the rendering yourself. Some commenters disliked the generic AI look of the designs. The exact Claude product or harness was not named.