> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://rafeblandford.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # An e-ink screen on the wall with TRMNL X - URL: https://rafeblandford.com/e-ink-screen-on-the-wall-trmnl-x/ - Published: 2026-07-27T12:50:06.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-28T22:15:15.000Z - Description: How I'm using a 10.3-inch e-ink panel from TRMNL to show a daily briefing, smart home, health info and more. - Author: Rafe Blandford - Tags: Product & Tech, RafeOS, #collab ## The panel There's a new screen in my flat, which is an odd thing to be pleased about, especially when I'm sort of trying to spend less time looking at screens. It's a [TRMNL X](https://shop.trmnl.com/products/trmnl-x?ref=rafeblandford.com): a 10.3-inch e-ink panel, 1872 × 1404, sixteen levels of grey, sitting on a magnetic USB-C dock with a touch bar along the bottom of the frame. A full refresh takes around a second. The big plus point is it's battery powered (up to 90 days), meaning it can be mounted almost anywhere. All of this makes it ideal for a passive, [glanceable screen](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-cockpit/) for [RafeOS](https://rafeblandford.com/tag/rafeos/). If you've arrived here as a [TRMNL](https://trmnl.com/?ref=rafeblandford.com) owner and don't know RafeOS: it's an agentic-first layer to help run my life, including an [API](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-one-api-mcp-cli/) that wraps health, calendar, email, messaging, home, transport and weather in verbs any client can call ([longer introduction here](https://rafeblandford.com/what-is-rafeos/)), enriched by AI-powered triage, cross-referencing, and judgement. It already has a [progressive web app dashboard](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-cockpit/), but a dashboard is a place you go. The panel is simply there. Always on, nothing to open, glanced at as I bumble around my flat. If done well, it should mean the phone stays in the pocket. ![TRMNL X mounted on a bookcase](https://rafeblandford.com/content/images/2026/07/IMG_7588-2-1.jpg) ## So what goes on it? Currently, five screens: the daily briefing, health, home, weather, and, as a bonus, a self-indulgent "measure" screen (currently showing traffic to my web sites). The rule that shaped all of them has three parts, all of it driven by the constraints of the device and the wish to prioritise glanceability. 1. Anything I'd act on somewhere else collapses to a count. "4 priority emails to reply" is the useful minimal signal. 2. Purely informational things keep more of their detail, because reading them is the whole action. A note that readiness is holding while sleep drifts is complete in itself, as is an alert about transport delays. Nothing follows except knowing it and making a better decision. 3. Exceptions are prioritised, but carry minimal explanation. "3 windows open" at dusk needs no sentence about why it matters. Presence and awareness are the message. ![Briefing screen, with AI generated today and readiness summaries](https://rafeblandford.com/content/images/2026/07/plugin-briefing.png) **Briefing, AI generated today and readiness summaries, plus prioritised actions and awareness.* ![Health, key metrics and trends from Oura, Withings, Apple Health and more](https://rafeblandford.com/content/images/2026/07/plugin-health2.png) **Health, key metrics and trends from Oura, Withings, Apple Health and more* ## Every surface has an action budget RafeOS is very deliberately multi-surface. Probably the biggest lesson from this mini-project is that every surface has an action budget: how easily you can do something about what it just told you. A phone's is high, so queues and buttons belong there. A watch gets counts and alerts. A panel on a wall has almost no budget at all, so it should describe the state of things and trust you to go and act somewhere. At first, I also had the space instinct backwards. E-ink feels precious, so I treated the screen as something to fill. Exactly wrong, less is definitely more, even on a 10-inch display. The panel works if a glance is sufficient, and a glance is only sufficient when there's little enough to take in as you walk past it. ![Home, with key stats, agile electricity and nudges](https://rafeblandford.com/content/images/2026/07/plugin-home.png) **Home, with key status, agile electricity and awareness nudges* Using e-ink definitely stretched my product thinking and design skills, mainly because the context and the constraints were unfamiliar. I rather enjoyed the exercise of simplification, and of creating around the feature-set of an e-ink display (size, greyscale, refresh rate, viewing distance). My self-discipline wasn't very good here; I suspect I'll be removing stuff, rather than adding it as time goes by. ## Worth seeing more than once Five screens on a fifteen-minute rotation means each one comes round roughly every 75 minutes. In practice I might glance at the panel a dozen times a day, but I'd only catch any given screen once or twice unless I went looking for it. That changes the question. "Would I want this when it happens to be up?" is a different test from "is this interesting?", and it did kill off a couple of ideas I had. ![Weather, which changes context depending on time of day and upcoming activities](https://rafeblandford.com/content/images/2026/07/plugin-weather.png) **Weather, which changes context depending on time of day and upcoming activities* Thankfully, TRMNL's platform has some clever features, including playlists that take per-plugin time windows, which means you can prioritise certain screens at certain times of the day. The screen also has a touch bar that steps through screens with one tap on the frame, which is genuinely convenient (along with the accompanying platform, it's one of the reasons I chose the TRMNL X). The screens stay passive; you just get a little say in which passive thing you're looking at. It's going to be interesting to see if the [TRMNL X](https://trmnl.com/?ref=rafeblandford.com) earns its wall space. I think this will be about whether key information gets absorbed in passing and I'm rather hoping it will mean less time looking at screens, courtesy of a screen. --- *How the five screens got built (quickly, and with Claude Code doing the heavy lifting) is the* [*next post*](https://rafeblandford.com/developer-experience-trmnl/)*.*