Being able to use NFC (Near Field Communication) tags in home automation systems like Home Assistant has been around for a while, but until recently I didn’t see the benefit of sticking NFC stickers or using NFC cards. Until it occurred to me that it could help me make my home smarter without having a lot of technology in sight. After all, those NFC stickers fit right behind the buttons on my switches.

I had an eInk screen for a while with the intention of turning it into a birthday calendar. Now there are projects that can take a list of birthdays from Google Calendar and display them on an eInk screen, but I decided to do something different. The advantage of an eInk screen is that it only consumes power when the image changes. Because a birthday calendar only needs to be adjusted once a day, the screen does not need to be powered all day.