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).
I agree that the guide is VERY unclear. The documentation here is a bit better, but still bad and mentions a monthly cost for DIY devices instead of a one-time dev-level API key cost.
The gist is that if you want to use their servers and you bought their device, they have an API key built in to the device for their non-dev-level API access, and it’s not supported (maybe also against API TOS, but I’m not sure) to extract the API key and use it when you flash custom firmware. Getting the dev-level API key doesn’t have this issue, though, because they give that to you when you pay for it.
When modifying the firmware to use on your own server, you don’t have to pay them anything because you won’t be using their API.
Is it possible to self-host a server? Is the server code open source?
Yes to both. The server code is open source under and MIT license as of last night.
IIRC based on the snazzy labs video about it, the answer to both those questions is yes
Ah. Can’t really complain too much about them wanting people who are putting load on their servers to pay for it. Ideally, that should mean that the end user is not the actual product. Good to see more options joining Inkplate.