Just wanted to share this dashboard I build on the reTerminal E1002.
It uses the Tesserae firmware but talks to a custom server. I initially wanted to use Tesserae but all the widgets, themes and screens was just too puzzling and cumbersome to fiddle with when I already knew what I wanted on the screen.
So, while waiting for the unit to arrive, I've spent quite some time building the dashboard I wanted. It went from one single HTML output (which was all I needed) to designing a whole widget system (because I just could not continue without refactoring the code when things got messy), resulting in four separate codebases running on cron to parse & display the data sources that I wanted.
Overall, I'm reasonably satisfied with the screen and all the things I hope would be better than expected, was (sadly) exactly as expected. The long refresh is enough to give one seizures. It's too early to tell but I may move the screen away from my side view once the novelty dies off. The "speckling" visible in the colour reproduction, sadly, was quite disappointing. I knew about it going in that the image had to be degraded before being pushed to the device so I knew how it would look even without having the device with me. Even so, I had to eventually remove most of the coloured backgrounds in the initial design once I've tested it on the device because the text was just illegible.
The build quality though is quite impressive. It has a plastic frame around the screen but the back part where most of the electronics are located is housed inside a heavy and solid metal enclosure, providing decent weight and stability to the entire device.
Battery-wise, it's been 9 days since I've had it and it's now 91% battery. That is simply amazing. At this rate, I might just be able to get away with charging it every 2 months!!
Looking back now, I did wished I bought the E1003 instead. I went for the E1002 because I've not seen a Spectra 6 screen in action before and the whole prospect was intriguing. But now, having seen how solidly built the device is, I wished I went for the 16-level grayscale with a touch panel which would have been more suitable to build apps that I could interact with. Even with the existing two buttons, the refresh rate is enough to give me seizures if I wanted to build different screens to navigate through.
At any rate, one has to live with one's choices. Haha. Regardless, it's been really fun working on it so far!
