inkplate10-weather-cal VS excalidraw

I guess it's yet another weather dashboard post? This is my take on a weather display using a Raspberry Pi to generate an image from HTML and an [Inkplate 10](https://soldered.com/product/inkplate-10-9-7-e-paper-board-copy/) to display it. A while back I was inspired by /u/speedyg0nz and his [MagInkCal](https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry\_pi/comments/pugv7d/maginkcal\_magic\_calendar\_project\_completed\_full/) project so I decided to do my own take on it. I ended up splitting my project into a server-client setup where the server (Raspberry Pi) is responsible for generating the image at a certain time each day and the client (ESP32) would render the image onto an e-ink display. On a 2000mAh battery I get approximately 4-5 months of charge, though I think 6 months is possible with 3000mAh. I'm currently tracking and updating battery life for this project on my GitHub repo. Features: - Accuweather/OpenWeatherMap API for weather data - [Google Static Maps API](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/maps-static/overview) for generating the map image of the configured location. - MQTT publish/subscribe features for the client to send logs to the server. - Automatic daylight saving handling. - Deep sleep ultra-low power usage (~21µA) Client and server code here: https://github.com/chrisjtwomey/inkplate10-weather-cal Let me know what you guys think! I'm quite happy with the system I put together, I don't normally publish projects as I never really feel they're ever in a state to share (also I'm terrible at READMEs). Fun fact: e-ink displays are incredibly expensive and... delicate.

ExcaliDraw - https://excalidraw.com/

ExcaliDraw

However, Notion and Obsidian can only help you write documentation. Well, how about some visuals? Let's talk about Excalidraw.

Fun fact: I used GA in Excalidraw, and it's still powering some of the interactions! https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/blob/master/package...

I was happy to find out recently that there is a way to make Mermaid diagrams WYSIWYG / drag and drop editable that the open source https://excalidraw.com has and did I mention it's open source!? With a LLM, you can go full loop back to Mermaid again after a few rounds of manual editing. "What a time to be alive!"

I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize i've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things.

Here are a few tools that i've been using lately that I really enjoy:

https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted firebase/supabase-like "backend in a box" using golang and sqlite. So far i've been really impressed. I've gone the route of extending the base offering with more go code and am really enjoying the experience.

https://excalidraw.com/ - An open source whiteboarding tool. Slick to use and after learning some keybinds I've gotten pretty fast at throwing together diagrams to explain things to people on my team. The killer piece though is that the filetype is just json, so I can source control my diagrams. Even better, their "export to png" function has a box to embed the json data _into_ the png, allowing me to slap the diagram in places that only accept images (think confluence) and still be able to change the diagram later if needed. 10/10.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ - Gitlab's CI/CD toolset is really impressive, and I've gotten really intimate with it's deeper features over the past year. I'd be curious though to hear from someone who's familiar with it vs it's competitors.