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Skip to content Seeed Feed This DIY e-paper display works in two official ecosystems or on your own server. Credit: Nick Indge Credit: Nick Indge One of the most useful gadgets in my kitchen is now a screen that never asks me for anything. I recently bought a $48 DIY display kit from Seeed Studio (yes, that’s three E’s), developed in collaboration with TRMNL , that lets me display whatever I want, using whichever software ecosystem I prefer.
I previously built something similar by modding a Lenovo ThinkSmart View, which was selling for around $30 on eBay during a liquidation. The Lenovo device was only ever intended for business-to-business video, but it does a decent job of running a fork of LineageOS . Unfortunately, its limited RAM makes it sluggish.
So when I came across the TRMNL kit and its e-paper display, I was sold. I’d have an always-on display that shows me the information I want, with no subscription required. And since the screen populates automatically, I would never have to wrestle with a slow interface.
I think they can live in harmony. Credit: Nick Indge I think they can live in harmony. Credit: Nick Indge The Seeed Studio kit and TRMNL ecosystem aren’t trying to compete with products like the recently announced Apple HomeView , a $299 home hub designed to get the whole family interacting with it.
If anything, the TRMNL kit is the HomeView’s antithesis. It’s designed to be entirely passive: The e-paper display stays on, cycling through potentially useful information on your desk or in your kitchen, from calendars and weather to news and all sorts of ideas thought up by its community members. Here’s how it works.
Choosing a path TRMNL, the platform company, was founded by indie hardware enthusiast Ryan Kulp in 2023 . Its first e-paper device launched via crowdfunding in 2024. Seeed Studio provides the hardware.
The established Shenzhen open hardware company is best known for its XIAO microcontroller boards. In March 2025, Seeed teased an XIAO e-paper panel on social media, prompting a community member to ask whether it could run TRMNL firmware. The question brought the two teams together, and in July 2025, they announced an official partnership to develop a DIY e-paper kit combining Seeed’s hardware designs with TRMNL’s firmware packages.
Seeed Studios monochrome display. Credit: Nick Indge Seeed Studios monochrome display. Credit: Nick Indge Seeed designs and manufactures the hardware, while TRMNL maintains the firmware, plugins, and hosted service.
But you’ll still need to make some decisions about how to set up the kit. There are three ways to get it running, depending on your budget and how comfortable you are with managing software yourself. The stock TRMNL setup connects you with the company’s “ BYOD ecosystem ” (bring your own device), letting you use trmnl.com as your information server with a 14-day free trial.
After that, you’ll need to pay a one-time $50 license fee to keep your device connected to TRMNL servers. If you’d rather go your own way, Seeed offers software options, including Home Assistant compatibility, that don’t require a TRMNL connection or license. You can also access the SenseCraft Seeedash platform, which includes a plugin repository and design workspace.
It’s worth checking out the options before committing to a $50 TRMNL license. The browser-based platform also includes a firmware-flashing tool Seeed describes as simple enough for anyone to use. If you already have a server up and running, you can point the device right at it.
Terminus is TRMNL’s open source container for this setup. The Terminus GitHub page describes the BYOS as providing “privacy first functionality by empowering you to run your own private server, network, and devices. You own the stack and the data.” The e-paper display and control board simply ping an API to retrieve the information to display.
You can even write plugins in HTML, which the screen renders as a bitmap. The trade-off is that your server needs to stay online, and maintaining it may bring some system-admin headaches some users may want to avoid. But hey, that’s why there are options.
An example of a weather app on the Seeed firmware. What’s in the box? XIAO ePaper Display Dev Board with XIAO ESP32-S3 Plus onboard 7.5-inch monochrome ePaper display (800 × 480 pixels) FPC extension cable (10 cm) FPC connector 2,000 mAh rechargeable Li-ion battery Wi-Fi antenna Two official case designs are available for 3D printing: a triangular prism and an L-shaped case.
I went for the latter, and although I’d hoped assembly would be as simple as plugging everything in and slotting the pieces into place, it proved to be a bit more involved. The kit came with all the hardware I needed, with one slight hiccup: I’d forgotten to order a case or display stand. Fortunately, TRMNL is a proper DIY project, and there are print files available for recommended stand setups.
A quick print at my local library’s Bambu printer and $8 solved the problem. I probably should have chosen something other than “dealer’s choice” for the PLA color, as I ended up with a bright canary yellow device case. At least it stands out on my kitchen countertop.
The hardware is included, not the stand. Credit: Nick Indge The hardware is included, not the stand. Credit: Nick Indge I’d recommend trying the prism shell design over the L-style case I chose because the latter required me to cut a channel for the ribbon cable extension.
It wasn’t a huge deal for a project like this, but you may need to do some extra work and fiddle with the fit. You’ll also need needle-nose pliers to remove the print’s support trees from the narrow space. Be prepared to clear out tiny rows of support trees.
Credit: Nick Indge Be prepared to clear out tiny rows of support trees. Credit: Nick Indge Assembly Before trying to fit everything into the printed case, I wanted to make sure the hardware worked, so I connected the parts on my workbench. The case-less assembly couldn’t be simpler: Connect the battery or a USB-C power source, plug the display directly into the board, and you’re good to go.
From there, connect your phone or tablet to the device’s Wi-Fi and enter your local Wi-Fi credentials. It lives! It lives!
If you attempt this build, be aware that it involves some delicate parts. The FPC is extremely fragile and can break if you force it to bend in a direction it doesn’t want to go (say, around the sharp angle of an L-shaped case). Getting the cable to conform to the design was challenging; I tried using tweezers to coax the cable around the bend but got nowhere fast.
Connecting and routing the ribbon cable extension was the most stressful part of the assembly. The case design just doesn’t accommodate the path the ribbon cable naturally wants to take. Following a helpful tip from a commenter on MakerWorld, I managed to snake the cable through the narrow passage by attaching a bit of paper tape to the end of the ribbon connector.
Don’t do what I did. Try the prism stand design. This was a pain.
Credit: Nick Indge Don’t do what I did. Try the prism stand design. This was a pain.
Credit: Nick Indge After powering on the kit for the first time, you’ll see the TRMNL logo and a QR code on the e-paper display. Scanning the code redirects you to a “ How to set up a new device ” guide written by Kulp, the TRMNL creator. The guide had been updated just 15 minutes before I clicked the link—a promising sign of a living document that is constantly evolving.
OK, now what? OK, now what? TRMNL.com I wasn’t planning to use the trmnl.com service, but I wanted to get a sense of what it offered for its $50 access fee.
The 14-day “free” trial is a misnomer, though. Before you can register your device, you’ll need to enter your credit card information and pay $1 for access. After plopping down a buck, the next screen welcomed me to my trial.
After registering your kit’s MAC address with trmnl.com, you’ll receive what the service calls a “friendly code,” a much shorter identifier that’s easier to remember than an entire MAC address. From there, you can install plugins to display content on a schedule throughout the day. The options are vast.
The marketplace contains standard fare like Google Calendar, weather, and stock quotes, alongside more niche offerings like rotating factoids about the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition in Star Trek . The TRMNL cloud plugin marketplace. The TRMNL cloud plugin marketplace.
If you’re looking for a hassle-free solution that “just works,” it’s hard to fault the package trmnl.com has put together. I’m a fan of any service that offers a one-time license fee over yet another forever subscription, and I think $50 is a fair price for the people behind the platform to be compensated for their work. After all, it handles all the rendering; the device simply displays information pulled from the APIs.
We need an Ars plugin! We need an Ars plugin! SenseCraft On the Seeed side, there’s SenseCraft, a similar marketplace to trmnl.com’s but without the license fee.
The website offers a browser-based flashing tool that promises to “flash official firmware from the browser. No coding. No terminal.
Just clicks.” The process was as simple as promised—once I figured out that I needed a USB-C to USB-C cable. I connected the board to my PC via the onboard USB-C port, opened the website in a Chromium-based browser (sorry, Firefox), selected my device from a drop-down menu, and clicked “Flash.” Once the device rebooted, setup followed essentially the same process as it did with TRMNL, minus the credit card. The tradeoff for free access is that Seeed is based in China and operates under its own privacy policy .
Your call, but it’s certainly nice to have options. Flashing the new firmware package. Credit: Nick Indge Flashing the new firmware package.
Credit: Nick Indge After registering a Seeed account, I entered a code displayed on the device, just as I had with TRMNL. SenseCraft’s marketplace is similarly packed with community contributions, but I had trouble determining which plugins were intended for my device and which might not be compatible. I tried publishing several different feeds to the display, but I couldn’t get them to render.
Initial screen on the Seeed firmware package. Guest starring Desk Pickle. Credit: Nick Indge Initial screen on the Seeed firmware package.
Guest starring Desk Pickle. Credit: Nick Indge SenseCraft leans heavily into AI-powered custom designs. While the platform offers a bit of everything, much of its content is geared toward the Chinese market, with English-language apps sprinkled throughout.
I can see why US users reached out to ask about TRMNL compatibility. You can import images directly to the screen in the Seeed FW. Check out this desk inception thing I’ve got going on.
Credit: Nick Indge You can import images directly to the screen in the Seeed FW. Check out this desk inception thing I’ve got going on. Credit: Nick Indge Bring your own server As TRMNL puts it, “the goal isn’t for BYOS to match parity with our hosted solution but to provide enough of a pleasant solution for your own customized experience.” Even a modest homelab server should have no trouble running the Terminus package, which acts as an API point that takes in information, renders the designs, and sends them to your e-paper display.
The process shouldn’t put meaningful strain on most systems. It’s great that there’s an “easy” version for a fee, but homelabbing is one of my favorite hobbies, and I love self-hosting projects wherever possible. When I first saw the DIY TRMNL/Seeed package, I was hoping I’d be able to control the feed myself.
We’re in. We’re in. For now, getting Terminus running on your server isn’t as simple as heading to your OS’s Docker app store and downloading a host service.
TRMNL has a great guide to walk you through the setup, but if you’re not comfortable working with docker compose files, you may want to pay the one-time license fee and leave the hosting to TRMNL. I won’t lie: I spent some late nights banging my head against the desk trying to get everything running. I’d initially tried hosting it on my main Unraid machine, but I kept running into bridge networking issues.
The Terminus package is a multi-container compose stack with pieces like Sidekiq worker , Postgres , Valkey , and a certificate initializer. If those containers can’t communicate with each other, nothing works. Thankfully, I’m a weird nerd who also runs a CasaOS deployment on another machine.
After I executed the bin/setup script there, everything worked as it should. The next issue was flashing back to the latest TRMNL firmware package. My unit arrived with FW 1.5.12, well behind the current 1.8.18 release.
Flashing proved to be an annoyance again because I struggled to keep the unit in flashing mode and get the web flasher to communicate with the serial port on my Fedora PC. After about 30 minutes of troubleshooting without making progress, I switched to my MacBook Pro, where the process worked on the first try. Go figure.
The Terminus Dashboard running on my CasaOS server. Credit: Nick Indge The Terminus Dashboard running on my CasaOS server. Credit: Nick Indge Once you’ve updated the display to the proper firmware and pointed its connections at your server, you can write and design your own display templates.
If starting from scratch isn’t your thing, TRMNL’s own plugins repo and a community-maintained catalog are available. A new Extensions Gallery in the Terminus web UI lets you import certain plugins for local hosting. The options are almost overwhelming, and I imagine it will take some time to get everything dialed in exactly as I want it.
I still plan to stick with the BYOS route, but the process isn’t as straightforward as I had hoped. For example, the setting for pointing the display at your local server is hidden under the “advanced” settings page during the web portal login. Terminus Gallery options.
Terminus Gallery options. Real-world impressions Once I deployed the display in my kitchen, I could get a better sense of how it would fit into my day-to-day life. The 7.5-inch e-paper display is large enough to read from across the room, and all the plugins I had running looked crisp and legible.
My son was enamored with the lunar cycles display and commented that “now I’ll always know what moon we have.” That’s where the kit shines: showing little rotating bursts of useful information that you might never have thought to look up before. Moon cycles on my kitchen cutting board. Credit: Nick Indge Moon cycles on my kitchen cutting board.
Credit: Nick Indge Seeed Studio says the display can run for three months on battery power. I haven’t had the device long enough to verify that claim, but I’m not sure I need the battery for much more than backup. The device powers via USB just fine, so I’ll probably leave it connected to a nearby hub on the counter.
The three-month estimate assumes that the display will update once every six hours. I prefer refreshes closer to once an hour, which would cut battery life significantly. Either way, the battery becomes largely irrelevant if you use a USB power source.
Final thoughts The official TRMNL route is starting to look mighty tempting if it means getting the type of headache-free, set-it-and-forget-it Ron Popeil experience I was expecting from this setup. I’ll keep tinkering with the BYOS solutions, but since those still run on the official TRMNL firmware, I may switch back and use the rest of my 14-day trial to see what best suits my needs. The $50 license fee would push my total project cost over $100.
That’s not a huge deal, but it’s double what I was expecting. There’s a stocks plugin called “Stonks.” Credit: Nick Indge There’s a stocks plugin called “Stonks.” Credit: Nick Indge The TRMNL/Seeed Studio collaboration has produced a true DIY device. It will never compete with a home assistant device from Amazon or Apple, but it’s not meant to, and that’s a good thing.
Not everyone wants a digital butler waiting for their next command. Sometimes you just want information that’s relevant to you and your life, displayed in a central place in your home. Nick Indge is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica covering hardware, embedded systems, and self-hosted infrastructure.
A former security investigator turned tech writer, he writes to help readers escape subscription traps and regain ownership of their digital lives. He lives in Chicagoland with his family and a goofball husky. 0 Comments
Source: Ars Technica
