IocTober Day 30 - Mortal Peril

We’re creating an IoT solution for every day of “IocTober”.

We’re excited by the potential of ePaper at Accelerando. These screens retain their information even when switched off, so allow you to create information displays that run on just a whiff of power.

Who doesn’t love the Weasley Family Clock from the Harry Potter universe. This device, realised so charmingly in the movies, shows the location in real time of each member of the household, with pointers which indicate words inscribed around the periphery such as “home”, “school”, “dentist” and even “mortal peril” (where I spend a lot of my own time these days). There are any number of homages to this clock around the nerdsphere, ranging from faithful to…less so.

Our ePaper location-clock is aiming for “least faithful”. It’s not a shaped like a clock, it doesn’t use pointers at all, but it’s a little bit magical, and it brings this idea from the Potterverse fully into the Muggle world, presenting a team location fridge magnet.

We will use

• The fabulous OwnTracks application, running on your family’s (or team’s) own cellular phones
• OwnTracks’ built in geofencing support, which lets us define locations of interest
• A cloud hosted MQTT broker to receive location updates
• A TTGO ESP32 module with built-in ePaper display
• A 3D printed enclosure and some magnets

This gives us a display device which queries the known location of each person (or item) of interest, and tabulates these on a low-power e-paper screen.

And for those millenials who struggle to read an old-style analog clock, our modernised version will be a patronus for your clock-angst.