The Cutest Weather Forecast on E-Ink and ESP32Thereâs a famous book that starts: âIt is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good e-ink display, must be in want of a weather station.â â or something like that, anyway. Weâre not English majors. We are, however, major fans of this feline-based e-ink weather display by [Jesse Ward-Bond]. Itâs got everything: e-ink, cats, and AI.The generated image needs a little massaging to look nice on the Spectra6 e-ink display.AI? Well, it might seem a bit gratuitous for a simple weather display, but [Jesse] wanted something a little more personalized and dynamic than just icons. With that in the design brief, he turned to Googleâs Nano Banana API, feeding it the forecast and a description of his cats to automatically generate a cute scene to match the dayâs weather.That turned out to not be enough variety for the old monkey brain, so the superiority of silicon â specifically Geminiâwas called upon to write unique daily prompts for Nano Banana using a random style from a list presumably generated by TinyLlama running on a C64. Okay, no, [Jesse] wrote the prompt for Gemini himself. It canât be LLMâs all the way down, after all. Gemini is also picking the foreground, background, and activity the cats will be doing for maximum neophilia.Aside from the parts that are obviously on Google servers, this is all integrated in [Jesse]âs Home Assistant server. That server stores the generated image until the ESP32 fetches it. Heâs using a reTerminal board from SeedStudio that includes an ESP32-S3 and a Spectrum6 coloor e-ink display. That display leaves something to be desired in coloration, so on top of dithering the image to match the palette of the display, heâs also got a bit of color-correction in place to make it really pop.If youâre interested in replicating this feline forecast, [Jesse] has shared the code on GitHub, but it comes with a warning: cuteness isnât free. That is to say, the tokens for the API calls to generate these images arenât free; [Jesse] estimates that when the sign-up bonus is used up, it should cost about fourteen cents a pop at current rates. Worth it? Thatâs a personal choice. Some might prefer saving their pennies and checking the forecast on something more physical, while others might prefer the retro touch only a CRT can provide. hackaday.com/2026/01/17/the-cuâŠ