This is more something that I'd like to get involved with, more of a sketching out of ideas which could become a money-making proposal. The ingredients appear to be easily available, it just requires the integration and a customer who's willing to spend money.
Recently there was a proposal at work for a kind of "status dashboard" on which the current health of a range of systems could be displayed. Think kind of devops people who are responsible for keeping systems up who would like to quickly and easily see the situation at a glance. Is the status green and sunny, everything fine, no action required, or is some component suddenly failing, status red or stormy, somebody needs to do something?
The important thing here is "at a glance", it should be unobtrusive when everything's fine, and shouldn't require effort to just check that everything's fine. So of course there's any number of ways to implement something like this, from a web page in the corner of a screen to an illuminated Defcon sign or something simple with traffic light LEDs.
Yet the solution which was decided upon in this instance was a full-size LCD monitor mounted on the wall, cabled via HDMI to an enclosed Raspberry Pi 5, connected via LAN. And I couldn't help thinking that a heavy, large, wall-mounted monitor (also blocking out daylight from the window) was just completely the wrong solution. Much better would have been an unobtrusive, low-power, 7-inch, wall-hanging E-ink display which just becomes an invisible piece of decoration when not needed and doesn't need switching off every evening.
So I'm thinking you get a 7-inch multicolour eink display, you drive it with a Pi Zero or maybe even something like a Pi Nano, you put it in a photo frame or maybe a custom case, and you power it via LiPo battery or a USB cable. The status probably only needs to be refreshed once every 5 or 10 minutes or so (depending on the exact use case), so inbetween refreshes the display can draw zero power (and emit zero light), and the Pi can draw minimum power to sleep. If the status is fine, then the display shows a calm and reassuring unobtrusive confirmation, and only if something is not fine does it then contain red or yellow elements to draw attention. No bulky wall mounts, no ugly monitors showing useless information. One glance and you can see what's what.
So here's where you start looking at existing products, and TRMNL is an obvious candidate, except that it appears to revolve around custom plugins offering feeds based on internet-based information like calendars, photos and weather forecasts. We want something different here, using custom auth to pull status data from internal systems. And the colour option is described as being "experimental". So it's not clear to me that this would have been an option.
Instead you're led to Instructables where people have built their own using available screen components, Raspberry Pis or similar controllers, and a variety of cases from Ikea photo frames to custom 3d-printed wall mounts. So it's certainly possible.
It would probably be a fair bit of effort for a one-off gadget though. Which brings the question, could they be made at scale and sold for profit? How much overlap is there in potential customers' requirements (size, colour options, framing options, software integration, rendering preferences), and how much could be done once and sold multiple times?
The front desk of a hotel could be another possible application of such a display product, but then instead of showing system status it could show other, guest-relevant information. Today's weather forecast, tonight's menu, this afternoon's guided walk option, that kind of thing.
Probably even a large hotel would only need a very small number of such displays though, and probably the guests would benefit more from a more interactive, touch-sensitive LCD screen than such a humble, static display.
So I guess not.
With more remote work being done, there's a growth in co-working and hot-desking spaces where individual work-areas are reserved and occupied by different people on different days. So you could imagine the convenience of the desks or stations having some kind of visible indicator to show who is occupying it today. If it's reserved, show the person's name and/or company logo. If it's free, show a QR code for the reservation system.
A co-working space would need not just one display but one per desk, making the solution very scalable. The problem is whether the space can justify the expense of all the hardware and integration. In this case a 7-inch display is probably too big — it doesn't need to be easily visible from far away, and only has a limited amount of information to show, so probably a much smaller display would suffice, in which case the hardware could be made much more cheaply.
Does such a product already exist to exploit this market, and is the number of reservation systems with which it has to interface unreasonably large?
Depending on the use case and the customer requirements, you can imagine several variants:
So to turn this into something cool, we just need some practical application with clear requirements, some initial funding for some prototypes, and a customer willing to help with integration into the required data sources.