Canary Herald. The note on the counter, writable from your phone.
A plug-in e-paper placard for the counter or fridge. Type "Take the chicken out of the freezer" and it's there about a second later, beside a calm line about your fleet and the weather. No glow at night, survives an unplug, no monthly fee.
Two paths: the Seeed reTerminal E1001 (7.5″ e-paper, ESP32-S3) · ~$79 at Seeed — or a XIAO + 4.2″ panel build at roughly half that
The sticky note, powered — and a status corner that stays honest
The kitchen counter is where the taped note, the fridge magnet, and the "dishwasher is CLEAN" sticky already live. Herald is that surface, writable from anywhere in the house — and when no note is up, it's the quietest honest status display the fleet makes.
E-paper, on purpose
No backlight, no glow in a dark kitchen at 2 am. Reflective like paper, so the sunlit counter that washes out an LCD makes it easier to read. Holds its last image with zero power.
About a second
Fast partial refresh redraws a note in roughly 0.3–1 s. A full refresh (the brief black-and-white flash) runs occasionally to keep the face crisp.
Plugs in — that's the point
A USB-C adapter at the counter. Mains keeps the radio awake, so your note is pushed instantly instead of polled every 15 minutes like battery e-ink products.
One minute, once
The paper shows a QR at first boot; one person scans it, and it's done. No accounts, no app for readers — a guest, a kid, a grandparent reads it like paper.
Designed against the graveyard
Kitchen displays keep dying the same five deaths while the sticky note outlives them all. Herald's rule: lose to the sticky note nowhere.
| What kills kitchen displays | How Herald dodges it |
|---|---|
| The subscription treadmill | Nothing to subscribe to, structurally: your hub renders the face on your LAN, and e-paper draws next to nothing. There is no monthly anything. |
| The cloud that dies with the company | No server to sunset. The whole path is local, so the product can't be turned off from an office you've never visited. |
| The counter becomes ad space | The resting face shows your fleet, your weather, your note. There is no channel by which anyone else's content could reach it. |
| Only one parent ever sets it up — or reads it | One person sets it up once; reading needs nothing from anyone. |
| Slower and noisier than just texting | Sending is one tap from a widget — no thread to pick, no recipients; the address is "the house." Receiving is a glance, in place, no phone, no unlock, and no feed for a kid to disappear into. |
Five faces, all honest
Send it any way that's faster than a text: a one-tap canned note from the widget, the share sheet from a recipe or calendar entry, a voice line to your assistant, or plain typing. A note rots — "dinner at 6:30" should not greet anyone at breakfast — so every note is stamped and expires back to the resting face on its own.
| Face | When | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Resting status + weather | default | "All 6 Canaries reporting · as of ~7:10 am" plus the hub's forecast — the calm truth line, words and glyphs, no color needed. |
| Your note + posted time | on message/set | "Take the chicken out of the freezer · posted ~3:10 pm." The stamp is coarsened to ten-minute buckets — same metadata discipline as the rest of the fleet. Auto-expires after a few hours, owner-tunable. |
| Witness gone quiet | on missed deadlines | "5 of 6 reporting — Garage quiet since ~6:50 am." Honest degradation on a schedule, because silence never gets to look like safety. |
| Cleared — the crumple | on "got it" tap | One physical button on the placard. Whoever takes the chicken out taps it; the note clears, and the sender's dashboard quietly shows "cleared ~4:10 pm." Household-level and anonymous — not a read receipt. |
| Last face, held | power loss | E-paper's superpower: it never goes blank-and-ambiguous, it just stops changing — stamp included. The hub notices the heartbeat stop. |
For makers: the proposed message topic
One retained topic on the fleet's existing MQTT spine, mirroring the command idiom the display family already uses. A rebooting placard re-renders the current note from the retained message:
mosquitto_pub -t 'securacv/herald-kitchen/message/set' -r \
-m '{"text": "Take the chicken out of the freezer", "expires_h": 4}'
Authoring surfaces on top of that: a Home Assistant text entity plus one-tap canned notes ("Trash night tonight"). The full design lives in the research dossier: canary_herald_research.md.
A message board that refuses to become an app
Paper doesn't panic
E-paper is too slow for alerting, and Herald doesn't pretend otherwise. Alerts live on the dash, the watch, and your phone. Herald states facts calmly — "Garage quiet since ~6:50 am" — and that's it.
No mic, no camera, no cloud
It replaces the sticky note, not the intercom, and adds zero sensing surface to your kitchen. The hub renders the face on your LAN; notes never transit anyone else's computer.
Nothing to buy yet. Something real to join.
No countdown clock, no fake backer count — just an open thread where interest becomes the next batch. Tell us what your counter would say.
Everything above is a concept, honestly labeled — there is no Herald kit, bundle, or price yet (the ~$79 is Seeed's own price for the reTerminal), and the research dossier in the main repo is the current state of truth. The open questions are physical — refresh cadence, ghosting, whether a 4.2″ face fits — and an outdoor door-placard variant is deferred.