Mastodawn

I really hate fedi drama, but I know most of my followers care about *true* Open Source and want the privacy of running stuff locally. Which is exactly what TRMNL promises, but not what they deliver. I know most of my followers would be as devastated as me when the device arrives and... almost nothing works locally.

I do hope they turn this all around and actually start becoming the Open Source project they claim to be. But as it stands, they're doing some severe openwashing of their platform.

This device is expensive for what you get. And that was OK to me! I thought I was supporting a big new Open Source ecosystem. It's fine to pay a premium for software. Software development costs money.

But I bought this to have all of the functionality *on my own server*, not to be locked in with a proprietary server or be forced to rewrite almost everything myself.

Sure, they *promise* they will, but I've seen that promise a million times. They also said you already could. They must prove it.

I would've even been OK had they clearly marked this as not supported yet from the start. Then I had known "okay, they're working on it, but it's not there yet, I'll buy into the system when the basic functionality I need is implemented". I might've even bought it on the promise of future support if I was clearly told it wasn't supported yet.

But now I spent money on a product that doesn't do yet what I need it to (and they promised it to) do and I'm being refused a refund and that is not OK.

The documentation has been somewhat updated, though they have decided to keep it marked as "supported", so it's still easy to misunderstand unless you read very thoroughly: https://github.com/usetrmnl/byos_hanami/pull/179/files

I'm also not sure if this makes properly obvious to everyone that it's not just your server accessing theirs: it also means that for example for calendar integration, you have to give their server complete access to your caldav URL and thus all your calendar data.

At least a bit more transparent :)

Added documentation recipe and plugin clarifications by bkuhlmann · Pull Request #179 · usetrmnl/byos_hanami

Overview There are minor updates and corrections. Details Addresses some of Issue #178. See commits for details.

GitHub

Sylvia Aug 2, 2025

My God I hate this company.

I had to yell at them several times to even get them to consider refunding me. And then I had to yell more because they wanted me to pay to ship it back.

And now I finally got it shipped back and I get the refund processed mail and they are not refunding the shipping nor taxes. That's over 40 Euros.

So now I have to yell at them *again*.

Never in my life have I seen such unprofessional and scummy behaviour from any company.

Sylvia Aug 2, 2025

This took *two weeks*. It took *two weeks* to get to the point of shipping it back and getting an email about a refund (they claim it will take 10 more days to actually send the money), and then the refund isn't even complete.

How many laws does TRMNL want to break? Zero respect for their customers.

Sylvia Aug 8, 2025

They eventually refunded me the shipping costs too. I don't think I believe that the shipping refund was "still processing", when they initially sent me an invoice for the product refund with shipping explicitly excluded and the shipping refund happening withing hours of me complaining. Consistently this "timing".

Luckily even managed to get FedEx to approve refunding the taxes, neat.

Now to keep an eye on seeing how https://github.com/BasementCat/fruitstand evolves so I can have a real open source ecosystem :)

GitHub - BasementCat/fruitstand

Contribute to BasementCat/fruitstand development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

Sylvia Sep 3, 2025

Update to my #TRMNL saga: I've successfully replaced it with #Fruitstand (https://github.com/BasementCat/fruitstand). See https://github.com/BasementCat/fruitstand/wiki/XIAO-7.5%22-ePaper-Panel for the screen I used it with and some setup info.

Very happy with Fruitstand. It's clearly more beta, but I'll just keep contributing small patches here and there. It's actually #OpenSource, actually has local plugins and is privacy-respecting (all unlike TRMNL) and from what I can tell the dev is chill and not a bigot :)

#DoNotUseTRMNL

Sylvia Sep 3, 2025

For those stuck with the TRMNL hardware (too late to return, whatever), @aks is working on #Queerminal (https://codeberg.org/Queerminal). Probably worth checking out too :)

Queerminal

Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led organization that aims to help free and open source projects prosper by giving them a safe and friendly home.

Codeberg.org

Izzy Aug 3, 2025

@SylvieLorxu When you originally got yours, I thought I might want one myself. Hearing how their "support" works, how irresponsible they behave, how unaccountable they want to be for their own wrong labeling/promises/product descriptions: TRMNL is definitely on my "droplist" – the list of things I dropped from even considering.

They're not doing themselves a favor with such behavior. Not only have they lost a customer (you) – they also have lost potential future customers this way (e.g. me).

shironeko Aug 3, 2025

@IzzyOnDroid @SylvieLorxu similar thing for me as well, I saw techmoan's video about it, got interested and did some digging found that their self host thing is basically nonexistent and noped right out.

jakob42 Aug 5, 2025

@IzzyOnDroid
Also there is this 🤬
https://social.lol/@adam/114959554043586459
@SylvieLorxu

Adam (@[email protected])

Attached: 3 images Just learned some really sad things about Ryan Kulp, the guy who makes the TRMNL. Would not have bought one if I had known beforehand.

social.lol

seeh #UnPlugTrump #SL5aura Aug 11, 2025

@SylvieLorxu Thanks for the warnings

lbnvds Aug 3, 2025

@SylvieLorxu Don’t worry. I wouldn’t call this drama at all. Regulations are regulations, and you’re right to call it out. They are not making you a favour once they are inevitably forced to refund you.

Wren 🐁Jul 19, 2025

@SylvieLorxu interesting, as I'd been curious about doing the same but evidently I misunderstood the "bring your own server" bit as well

Anyway, I wanted color support for a custom device, so I've been writing my own server software that might be exactly what you're looking for ( and will be writing firmware to go with it), might be what you're looking for if you don't mind a little tinkering

@Wren I'm definitely interested to hear more! :)

Wren 🐁Jul 19, 2025

@SylvieLorxu I'll push up what I've got soon! Definitely would be neat if it ended up being useful for more than one person lol

Wren 🐁Jul 24, 2025

@SylvieLorxu Round 1! web side is mostly functional (still needs to produce actual BMPs, not PNGs), and haven't touched microcontroller-side rendering code but I don't expect that to be awful
https://github.com/BasementCat/fruitstand

GitHub - BasementCat/fruitstand

Contribute to BasementCat/fruitstand development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

Sylvia Jul 24, 2025

@Wren Looks like a good start, I started watching the repo :) I'm interested to see where this goes because I am really into the idea of configuring some easy plugins that generate a nice little dashboard. I may end up contributing some plugins at some point, but I don't want to promise (I'm quite overwhelmed with my own Open Source projects).

Definitely would love to be kept up to date though!

Wren 🐁Jul 24, 2025

@SylvieLorxu always open to suggestions and pull requests! It's not very extensible right now, I laid the groundwork but it's definitely not there yet. Long term I do want to make it possible to pretty easily plug in more screens distributed as python packages but I need to think through what that looks like, trying to get the base functionality I need in place first

Samantaz Fox Jul 25, 2025

@Wren @SylvieLorxu for the mcu side, you could start with Adafruit's CircuitPython. It already has drivers for a ton of displays and can load images (jpeg and bmp, maybe png too?)

@Wren Sounds cool!! I’m looking forward to reading through the repo when I have a little more time. CC @SylvieLorxu

@Wren @SylvieLorxu Have you seen this DIY video as well? https://youtu.be/58QWxoFvtJY #trmnl

I built an E-Ink Calendar with a Raspberry Pi

YouTube

Kramer Canfield Jul 31, 2025

@SylvieLorxu I suggest trying the Bring Your Own Server software (e.g. the Laravel based one) you can use and never proxy images from the cloud or even log in to the TRMNL web app. I use the Laravel one and it runs completely on my home network. I don’t get the benefit of the native plugins though so I’m completely using my own plugins I have made or adapted. I’m also investigating alternative BYOD hardware to save cost. Looking forward to other ideas where possible. @Wren

Sylvia Aug 1, 2025

@kramercanfield @Wren So, if they would've been honest in their marketing and documentation, I'd have accepted that. But they promised plugins were supported, yet don't let you run it offline. That type of openwashing is just not acceptable to me.

I'm okay with making sacrifices when self hosting, I'm not okay with paying a premium because I'm promised features X, Y and Z but I find out only X is available to me after paying. That's just not OK.

Sylvia Aug 1, 2025

@kramercanfield @Wren I'm glad custom plugins are possible (though woefully under documented), but hiding that all "official" plugins are proprietary felt like extremely sketchy openwashing to me. Together with them saying "Bring Your Own Server" supports plugins with no such note whatsoever completely broke my trust in them.

Just out of curiosity though, where do people host these custom plugins, how are you supposed to discover them and how are you supposed to install them? Docs were lacking.

@SylvieLorxu @Wren This repo has some native plugins (in Ruby) but if you scroll down a little there are links to tools and community plugins https://github.com/usetrmnl/plugins where you can find the markup. There are quite a few community ones. You have to open a Pull Request or have a Developer license to get added to the featured list and I haven’t tried that yet. I agree the docs could and should be clearer about what “support” means for various features on the BYOS options.

@SylvieLorxu @Wren The BYOS Laravel server has a built in editor that lets you add Blade code (I throw in some PHP sometimes) and set your API endpoint and data refresh. I’ll reply here with a screenshot sometime today if I can.

Sylvia Aug 1, 2025

@kramercanfield @Wren Those community plugins are sadly proprietary too, there is no license specified on that repository :(

Open to look at is something but... not remotely sufficient for a project that so openly claims to be open source :(

@SylvieLorxu @Wren I’m not too familiar with open source licensing. It seems like the intent of the list here is sharing and re-use at a minimum. Here is a resource I found for myself https://choosealicense.com/ and what happens without a license https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/. Is this a good resource?

According to this page, the GitHub Terms of Service allow others to fork a public repo by default and recommends asking the maintainer of a repo to add a license.

Choose an open source license

Non-judgmental guidance on choosing a license for your open source project

Choose a License

Sylvia Aug 2, 2025

@kramercanfield @Wren It gets the basics right. Some criticize the GitHub page for making copyleft licenses sound "too negative", but that's all.

But yeah, open source has a pretty clear definition and just being able to fork it on GitHub is not enough: https://opensource.org/osd

The GitHub forking being allowed is because of GitHub's terms of service, so they are protected legally, it purposefully does not allow more than using basic GitHub features because it is just for their legal certainty.

The Open Source Definition - Open Source Initiative

Introduction Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open source software must comply with the following criteria: 1. Free Redistribution The license shall...

Open Source Initiative

Wren 🐁Aug 1, 2025

@kramercanfield @SylvieLorxu I built this mostly because I wanted color display support (and because I can)

0x4d6165 (Julie or Mae)Aug 3, 2025

@SylvieLorxu the founder is also a trump-loving fascist

Sylvia Aug 3, 2025

@0x4d6165 I learned that afterwards sadly. Which does explain why the product is such a scam.

Thibaultmol 🌈Aug 3, 2025

@0x4d6165 @SylvieLorxu this^

Context:
https://social.lol/@adam/114959554043586459

Adam (@[email protected])

Attached: 3 images Just learned some really sad things about Ryan Kulp, the guy who makes the TRMNL. Would not have bought one if I had known beforehand.

social.lol

Atemu Mar 25

@SylvieLorxu

I'm not sure I'm following. According to them, there is an option to proxy their hosted offerings in order to serve it *in addition* to your own content. That sounds quite reasonable to me?

Are you implying that there is no option to render arbitrary web content locally and serve it to the device as the dev claims to be doing with their own device at home?

The lacking return policy is not great but you are importing this from the U.S.; EU commerce law simply does not apply.

Sylvia Mar 25

@Atemu Did you read the other messages where I went into more details on how this is a bait and switch?

Tl;dr: They promise a full open source ecosystem, but all the plugins are proprietary and locked to their cloud. You can do *nothing* without their server except render some plain text.

And no, if you sell your products to an EU citizen, you have to follow EU law.

Atemu Mar 26

@SylvieLorxu

If I'm getting this right, your issue with them is that they do not open source all of the integrations they offer as a service?

Because both your initial post and the issue make it sound like you can't even make the server render e.g. your own html and send that to the device.

If the screen can continue to display locally-controlled content even in the event the company went its-up (which is my current understanding; please correct me if I'm wrong), I do not see the issue.

Atemu Mar 26

@SylvieLorxu

RE: consumer rights on import: Do you have a source on that?

My current understanding is that region-specific law can only apply to entities with legal presence in that region. In the case of an import, the other party has – by definition – no such presence; that's why it's an import.

The GDPR is an EU law that claims world-wide effect but that was/is actually a hugely controversial novum and the debate on the effectiveness of that is far from settled AFAIK.