Has anybody on here had an experiment with the supermarket tags?
My understanding is that you get a bunch of the tags, somehow get a base-station/transceiver working with them, and push data as images.
I’d love to hear from anyone who’s had a go. I quite fancy having some little displays around the house with useful info for the room.
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I have a few epricer ones and they’re a pita to use.
Have to build an IR blaster to program them.
You also can’t use them once the battery is flat or if you remove the battery because it uses volatile memory to store the firmware.
it uses volatile memory to store the firmware
What the what?!
Yuuup, they use an ASIC too.
Here’s an attempted teardown https://www.youtube.com/live/AN0CMmFQIi0
Also interesting: http://furrtek.free.fr/index.php?a=esl
Can you link a source where to buy them or a model? I don’t have any information. But I’d be interested, too.
They’re generally sold in bulk to supermarkets. You can get them in the usual Chinese supplier websites for a few dollars each, or scour ebay for old ones that stores may sell when they switch systems or whatever.
Someone has already made a home assistant integration for at least one type of labels: https://openepaperlink.de/
Thank you very much. That seems like a nice addition to my little smarthome. But there are quite a lot of options available. Maybe I can learn something, too. It’d be nice to push some messages through the house and have the weather and train delays available in the bathroom in the morning (for example).
My first integration is going to be putting my standard “going out” dashboard by the front door.
Being able to glance and see UV index, temperature, rain probability is dead useful.
Hey, I developed some of these for a different use case at my job.
Generally they use BLE servers to query and update every BLE device one after the other.
I would venture to guess that these tags have a ublox BMD-3xx variant controlling them and you can connect via Bluetooth low energy every X hours.
If you just want the displays they use, here are some kits:
It’s also quite common for updates to be sent using a ceiling-mounted infrared transmitter, like this brand which is common where I am:
https://www.pricer.com/products/devices/electronic-shelf-labels
People have figured out the data formatting to update some of the lower-security variants (including that “Pricer” brand):
Check out these maybe:
https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=29. eInk Price Tags
http://furrtek.free.fr/index.php?a=esl
There’s more but I’d have to search for it, it’s a good starting point though.
