Building an e-paper status dashboard is the right project to learn how much the display technology constrains the software stack. We walk hardware choices (Pi versus ESP32), the refresh and ghosting physics that shape the design, partial-refresh strategies, ESPHome and Python options for rendering, deep sleep for months of battery life, and the enclosure and mounting decisions that make the difference.
Raspberry-Pi
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Build an E-Paper Status Dashboard -
Raspberry Pi vs the Competition: How the SBC Landscape Stacks Up in 2026 The Raspberry Pi 5 is not the fastest single-board computer you can buy, nor the cheapest, nor the one with the most I/O — Rockchip RK3588 boards from Orange Pi and Radxa beat it on cores, NVMe, and 2.5GbE for less money. So why is the Pi still the default? Its moat is software and supply: a purpose-built OS, thousands of compatible HATs, the best documentation and community in the category, and a committed production lifetime that the clones can't match. This guide maps the whole landscape — the RK3588 challengers, the proven Odroid, NVIDIA's CUDA-powered Jetson, x86 N100 mini-PCs, and the ESP32 microcontroller floor — and gives you an honest framework for picking the right board instead of the most-hyped one.
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3D Printing for Your Homelab A practical catalog of 3D-printable upgrades that turn a messy homelab into a serviceable one — mini-racks, Pi and SBC mounts, cable management, drive caddies, and labeled panels — with notes on which community designs are actually worth printing.
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Klipper vs Marlin: Why Serious 3D Printing Moved to the Raspberry Pi Why serious 3D printing moved from Marlin to Klipper — offloading motion planning to a Raspberry Pi, what input shaping and pressure advance actually buy you, and the real tradeoffs of each firmware approach.
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K3s on Raspberry Pi and Homelab: Lightweight Kubernetes That Actually Works A complete hands-on guide to running K3s on Raspberry Pi hardware and homelab servers — from bare-metal bootstrap to production-grade workloads with ingress, persistent storage, and GitOps deployments.