I have recently been E Inking All The Things: I'm waiting for my new Pebble E Ink to be shipped, I read in bed every night on Kindle, and I've recently been outfitting my home office with TRMNL screens.

TRMNL is a customizable e ink display platform that brings your personal data to life through a rich ecosystem of plugins (both first and third party) as well integrations, perfect for creating ambient information displays that update throughout the day. I use a TRMNL in my kitchen to share a calendar with my household, track my daily github contributions, track my raycast downloads, and more. 

I recently received a marketing email from TRMNL, that I usually skip over, but something in this one piqued my interest. They were holding a hackathon to build an esports-related plugin to add to their ecosystem.

I've been pretty busy with work and home life stuff for awhile, so I wanted to carve out something fun for me to do a few nights the week before Thanksgiving. I decided I would take a shot at participating to learn the ecosystem and build more TRMNL plugins for myself over time.

I'm a huge fan of mechanical keyboards, and I'm always looking to be more efficient at typing, both at work as well as in games. I've used various tools over the years to test my typing, but the one I keep coming back to was Monkeytype. I don't practice often, but I wish I did.

The Plan

• If Monkeytype had an API, could I securely pull that data into my TRMNL plugin?
• Could I represent that data in a 4 bit 7.5" eink display
• Would I personally want to use the outcome?