Summary
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QuietDash: A Raspberry Pi eInk desktop panel that updates infrequently to avoid distraction
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At a glance, it shows your workday progress, tasks, weather, calendar, time and news/RSS feed
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eInk reduces power consumption and screen glare, allowing the control panel to blend into your workspace
Sometimes it seems that tools designed to increase your productivity end up detracting from it. With all the notifications, messages and pings coming in, I often find myself checking incoming alerts rather than doing anything. If you really want your productivity assistants to leave you alone once and for all, you could do a lot worse than building QuietDash, a Raspberry Pi-powered eInk display that won’t bother you.
QuietDash won’t invade your desktop with notifications
It also looks great
The creator of QuietDash, fberrez, has a full write-up of his invention GitHub. The idea behind QuietDash is that it records all the information you’d expect from a DIY dashboard, with one caveat: it updates multiple times. hour. It’s not something you’ll stick your eyes to all day. It’s designed to give you everything you need to know at a glance so you can get right back to work.
Here are all the features that QuietDash supports:
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Workday progress alarm so you can see how much time is left in the day at a glance
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Today’s tasks
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Weather
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Calendar
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Time and date
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News/RSS feed
Interestingly, fberrez has some good reasons behind choosing an eInk display for work. I thought it was because it had a low power profile and was specifically designed for a low refresh rate, but fberrez makes the excellent point that a backlit screen is distracting in itself. By using eInk, QuietDash can blend into the background more easily than if it uses an LCD screen instead of fberrez.
Although you can build your own via the GitHub page, you can also express your interest in a prebuilt version. QuietDash website.
