Use case · Workplace
Meeting-room and desk signs, in color
Joan, Evoko, and Robin’s in-room displays are still monochrome. That’s a live gap. Color e-paper — occupancy in green, held-for in yellow, do-not-disturb in red — reads across a corridor at 15 feet without anyone learning a new UI. Battery-powered, mounts anywhere, months between charges.
The category shift: The first generation of e-paper room signs (2014–2022) was black-and-white because color e-paper wasn’t practical yet. Spectra 6, shipping in volume since 2023, made the format viable — but the incumbents haven’t retooled. That’s the opening.
What we build
- Meeting-room signs — 5.9″ or 7.3″ Spectra 6. Green / yellow / red status readable from the far end of the corridor. Tap-to-book NFC option. Wall-mount or glass-mount.
- Hot-desk plates — 4″ Spectra 6. Employee photo, booking window, colored dot for team affiliation. Magnetic to the desk edge, USB-C charge weekly.
- Floor-plan wayfinding — 13.3″ Spectra 6. Live floor plan, colored zones, updates when the org chart or desk allocation changes. Battery + solar option.
- Integration — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Robin, Envoy, Ubiqisense. If your calendar is anywhere with an API, our cloud will listen.
Why color actually matters here
A monochrome room sign forces the reader to read the text to know the room status. That’s a couple of seconds of cognitive load per glance, and it fails from 20 feet down a corridor. A colored status field is instant and pre-linguistic — you don’t “read” a red light, you just know. Multiply that by hundreds of glances a day across a floor and it becomes a wayfinding-quality improvement, not a color-accent nicety.
What the stack looks like
Hardware
Our reference PCB with an ESP32-S3 module, driving Good Display’s GDEP073E01 (7.3″) or GDEP133C02 (13.3″). Wi-Fi + Bluetooth on the SoC (Bluetooth for on-site provisioning), rechargeable Li-ion cell sized to your refresh rate, optional NFC reader for tap-to-book. FCC and CE modular certifications already in the module, so your compliance filing is a fraction of a full-radio submission.
Firmware
Wakes on calendar push (not polled), refreshes only when state actually changes, deep-sleeps in between. That’s how a device checking a room every few minutes still runs for months on a small cell. OTA updates go through your fleet management, not a random third-party MDM.
Cloud
Calendar bridges (Google, Microsoft, Robin), tenant isolation for multi-customer white-label deployments, a floor-plan editor for wayfinding, role-based access. Deployed on your Vercel account or hosted by us at per-device pricing.
What it costs, roughly
- Pilot — $25-40k NRE, 20 rooms on stock reference hardware in your enclosure, integrated with one calendar provider. 6 weeks.
- White-label product — $80-150k NRE, custom PCB and enclosure, multi-calendar, multi-tenant cloud. 12-16 weeks.
- Unit cost at 500-5k volume — $80-180 per unit, in your logo.