Tinta (formerly inki) launches its pre-launch campaign on Crowd Supply
Back in November 2025, we introduced inki, an open-source, battery-powered e-paper display built by community member c0de111 that shows live Seatsurfing booking data on your office walls. The project has since been renamed to Tinta, and it just went live with a pre-launch campaign on Crowd Supply.
Why this matters for Seatsurfing users
Crowd Supply pre-launch campaigns work a bit like a signal boost before crowdfunding begins: people who sign up for the update mailing list help decide whether the project actually turns into a shippable product. If you run Seatsurfing and have ever wanted a wireless, battery-only display for desks or meeting rooms, signing up costs nothing and directly influences whether Tinta gets made.
What's new since November
A lot has happened since our last post. Here's what's been added:
Book with an NFC tap
Tinta now has an NFC chip with a coil built into the enclosure. Simply tap your smartphone against the display, and it wakes and powers the NFC chip purely from the phone's field — no battery draw for the tap itself — to trigger a booking.
The same tap can write, not just book
That same NFC interaction can now also push content instead of triggering a booking: a short text note or a small hand-drawn sketch from your phone, written straight onto the e-paper. It's a digital replacement for the sticky note taped to a doorframe.
A power concept built for unattended operation
Tinta's defining feature is its energy design. From the start, the goal was to run unattended and automatically on existing infrastructure — no wiring, no dedicated network — while reliably displaying Seatsurfing data.
The numbers back that up. One 4.2" unit in daily use has been running for 468 days on a single set of AAA alkaline batteries, waking up roughly once per hour — 4,772 display updates so far — and it's still going.
No charging cable, no swapped batteries, a full year unattended on the wall. This isn't a datasheet estimate — it's a real discharge curve from a device in actual use.
Fully open source
Firmware, PCB design, and enclosure are all open source and available on GitHub: github.com/c0de111/tinta
(Note: if you bookmarked the old inki repository from our previous post, that link is now dead — the correct one is above.)
A closer look
Get involved
If Tinta sounds like something you'd want on your own office walls, the most useful thing you can do right now is join the update mailing list on Crowd Supply — it's the signal that tells the maker whether to move forward with production.
👉 crowdsupply.com/wake-electronics/tinta
Thanks to c0de111 for building Tinta and for keeping it open source. Projects like this are exactly the kind of community-driven work that makes the Seatsurfing ecosystem richer. ❤️