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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/ar0v3r on 2026-06-10 04:05:54+00:00.
Hi all! Sharing progress on my E1003 ESPHome project- nothing particularly special on the calendar side, but I think I've worked out the battery optimization with some real world numbers. TL;DR: I'm seeing what looks like 3+ months of battery life at 4hr refreshes. The Github is here with a picture here. Seeed link.
I wanted an e-ink display on the fridge for family scheduling, ideally wireless. Comparing the TRMNL X and the E1003 (same display, same ESP32S3 but a few key differences), I went with Seeed (despite their stated lack of ESPHome support) after seeing this XDA page. $182 shipped to California, arrived from China in under a week. Several mounting options on the back...4 cup magnets and 4 M3x10mm screws later, it's on the fridge.
The device looked great out of the box, good overall build quality with metal enclosure, touchscreen and sensors are nice-to-have. Unfortunately, taking a multimeter to the device showed deep sleep was drawing ~4mA, enough to kill the battery in 20-30 days and turn wake power consumption basically irrelevant. After some digging (Seeed publishing the schematics was a huge help here), I found that the SD card and touchscreen driver pins were floating HIGH during sleep. Properly holding those pins LOW dropped the sleep current to below my meter's detection limit. I'm losing ~1% battery/day (give or take) over 10 days, which projects to roughly 3+ months...good enough that I've shelved the Adafruit TPL5110 hard power cut I had planned (which could potentially triple that number). Overall I'm very happy with the outcome, and I think the time savings + quality of components was worth the cost difference vs going full DIY with the build.
Special thanks to u/averitablerogue for giving this code a test on his project as well.