I just wanted to shout out TRMNL.
They have an interesting product, and they’re trying to build a business that includes a lot of open source aspects.
The device that they sell is proprietary, but it’s also just an ESP32, screen, enclosure, and battery, with a custom PCB for convenience. They plan to add instructions to build your own device, and their firmware is open source under a GPLv3 license.
By default, their device connects to their servers, and they have a slick web configuration tool for people who don’t care about having smart devices call home, but you can easily modify the firmware to connect to your own self-hosted server instead. As of this evening, both the Phoenix and Sinatra server implementations are open source under an MIT license after I pointed out that they had no license in an issue, and they pretty much immediately updated the repositories.
There are two other repositories that they have not added a license to, but given their swift response, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and I would expect them to be updated shortly.
They have not shared all of the plugins that are available on their hosted service for use on a self-hosted instance, but a few are available for use and there are many plugins made by others available as well!
As soon as they update those last two repositories, I plan to pre-order one (unlike the conceptually cool VU Dials who’s creators still have not added a license even after being called out by the co-creator of Rocky Linux).
$20 to unlock the API killed it for me. If it has a built in way yo lock it down, it’s not an open platform and is a great way for bugs to brick a device.
Charging a one time fee for the API seems like a decent way to ensure continued operation.
But if you don’t like it, you can run your own server
Checked the site quickly and didn’t find the information, but judging by the top-level comment, they don’t charge you if you want to use their cloud service, but if you want to “unlock” the ability to use someone else’s.
not quite.
If you buy their device, the cost to use their service is built-in to the cost of the device, so you get access to their service and all of the 3rd-party plugins at no extra charge.
If you would like to write your own plugins for their service, or access their service on one of their devices, but with custom firmware, you need to pay $20 one time for an API key to get access that is more flexible than the limited way the stock firmware communicates with their service.
From looking at the source code of the firmware, it seems like you can extract the “API key” that gets generated by your device with the stock firmware and would technically be able to hardcode that in custom firmware, but I don’t know if that gives the same level of access as the official API key that you pay for or if it against any TOS or anything.
If you are hosting a server yourself or are accessing a different server, you can very easily flash custom firmware that changes the target server, and there is no charge for that from TRMNL. The $20 is to pay for extra API calls to their servers over the lifetime of the device than what they accounted for in the purchase price.
In their documentation, they also briefly mention a recurring charge for API access if you want to use a DIY device with their hosted service, but I didn’t see any mention of that anywhere else as the documentation for DIY devices is yet to be fleshed out.
Damn. I would really love one of these, to show off books, show my daily tasks, etc. Really unfortunate its locked down.
This is very similar to what Home Assistant offers as a paid service. I don’t see this complaint thrown at them, though. Also, any system that uses authentication has “a built in way to lock it down”.
Most apps if not all are closed source