Build Log
Notes from the bench.
Short notes from building Newsboard, solo: the tuning, the dead ends, and the rough early versions behind a panel that just shows the news.
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11 July 2026
The shells are here
In May the aluminium case was a promise. The first milled shells are back from the mill and the anodising bath, and the promise is a thing on my desk now.
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10 July 2026
A place to point people at
Newsboard has a front door now: inkmere.com is live, built dark and quiet around photographs of the real machined unit. And the first run has a date-shaped plan: Kickstarter.
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7 July 2026
The first minute
I re-onboarded my own panel and the setup flow told me it had failed at the exact moment it was working. Fixing the first minute a buyer spends with this thing.
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5 June 2026
Thirty milliamps
Letting the radio and CPU doze through the long idle wait cut the panel's standby draw by about 81%, with no change to how fast Refresh now feels.
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3 June 2026
The panel, in your pocket
The companion app that pairs with the panel and quietly runs it: online status, a week of refresh stats, firmware updates, and Wi-Fi changes.
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24 May 2026
The Pi was overkill
The first brain was a Raspberry Pi. It worked, but it was a whole Linux computer for a job that's mostly 'fetch one picture every ten minutes.' So I moved to an ESP32-S3.
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12 May 2026
Machined, not moulded
Why Newsboard panels are CNC-cut 6061 aluminium, with the honest note from May about the black prototype, and the July update: the milled shells are real now.
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5 May 2026
Into the foam
Before there was any aluminium, there was a block of packing foam, a hot-glue gun, and eight wires soldered straight onto the board's bare pads.
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24 April 2026
Eight wires and a ribbon
Getting the panel, the driver board and the microcontroller talking. One flat ribbon, and eight SPI wires I had to learn the hard way.
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21 April 2026
First light
I wired a Raspberry Pi to a bare 7.8-inch e-ink panel, pushed a front page at it, and braced for nothing. The ink moved.
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21 April 2026
One pass, half a second
The first refresh was slow and I wasn't sure why. Dropping it from eight bands to one took the paint from about 4.4 seconds to half a second.
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