Specs & specifics
The technical bit.
Numbers, dimensions, and what arrives in the box. For people who want to know exactly what they're setting on their desk.
One screen, four buttons, no distractions.
A 5.83" four-color e-paper panel in a hand-finished case, sized to sit beside a laptop without competing with it. Always on. Refreshes every fifteen minutes. The rest of the time, it draws zero current and stays exactly where it was.
The drawing above is a working illustration, not a photo. Photographs of the real hardware go here as the first units come off the bench, no mock-ups standing in.
What's inside.
A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W behind the panel. Quiet, low-power, and capable of running the dashboard for years on a USB-C cable. It is mains-powered over USB-C — there is no battery; it stays plugged in on your desk. Black anodized aluminum bezel on the front, black plastic housing behind. A small steel plate in the base lends it heft; it sits like a paperweight.
- Display
- 5.83" GDEY0583F41 e-paper · 648 × 480 px · 4-color (black, white, red, yellow)
- Refresh time
- ~18 seconds, every 15 minutes (between refreshes the panel draws zero current)
- Processor
- Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (1GHz quad-core, 512MB)
- Wireless
- 2.4GHz Wi-Fi · WPA2 Personal & Enterprise (eduroam)
- Buttons
- 4 × tactile switches (today view, week view, settings, mark the next thing done)
- Indicator
- Single red LED (blinks during refresh, solid for a second when complete)
- Power
- USB-C, 5V · ~0.4W average · ~2W peak during refresh (mains-powered — no battery; stays plugged in)
- Dimensions
- ~150 × 125 × 35 mm (pre-prototype estimate, sized for the new 4:3 panel · final number lands once the first unit is on the bench)
- Weight
- ~280 g (most of which is steel ballast in the base)
- Materials
- Black anodized aluminum bezel, black plastic back housing, steel base plate
What arrives.
Hand-packed in kraft cardboard. No plastic clamshells. No "quick-start guide" with stock photos. Just the device, the cable, and a single folded sheet of cream paper that explains setup in fourteen lines.
Not in the box: no power adapter (most desks have a spare USB-C plug). No mounting hardware (it's a paperweight). No printed manual beyond the setup card. The rest of the documentation will live online once the first fifty ship.
Schools that work.
Margin pulls assignments from the course site your school already uses. We test against each platform on each campus before adding it to the supported list. What works in Canvas at one school sometimes breaks at another.
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Canvas · Calendar
- Northern Illinois University Blackboard · beta
Compatible, pending campus verification as of June 2026
Canvas works automatically through the browser plugin. Blackboard, D2L, and Moodle work once you add the iCal calendar feed your school publishes. We test each campus before promoting it to the confirmed list above; the more waitlist signups we see from a campus, the sooner it gets verified.
Canvas
- University of Michigan
- The Ohio State University
- Penn State University
- University of Washington
- University of Texas at Austin
- University of Florida
- Indiana University
- University of California, Los Angeles
- University of California, Berkeley
- Northwestern University
- University of Pennsylvania
- New York University
- University of Maryland, College Park
Blackboard · Blackboard Ultra
- Drexel University
- Stony Brook University
- George Washington University
- University of South Carolina
D2L Brightspace
- Purdue University
- Michigan State University
- University of Nebraska–Lincoln
- University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Moodle
- California State University campuses
- City University of New York (select campuses)
Margin works with any school running Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, or Moodle. Calendar events sync from anything that publishes an iCal feed: Apple, Google, Outlook, Proton, Notion, and most schools' official academic calendars. Don't see yours? Tell us →
See yours up there? Join the waitlist →
Plug in, give it Wi-Fi. The rest is your laptop.
First boot starts a small captive Wi-Fi network called margin-setup. Connect to it from your phone, pick your Wi-Fi network, and enter its password — on campus eduroam, your school login. About ninety seconds later the device reboots into its normal life. That is the whole job on the device: Wi-Fi, plus your calendar feeds if you want them — no account or Todoist sign-in here. On first power-on it also walks you through its four front buttons once, then gets out of the way.
Canvas, Todoist, and claiming the device all happen afterward, on your laptop, in the browser plugin: install it, sign in, confirm your school's class portal, do a one-time Todoist sign-in, then type the short code on the screen to pair the device. Budget five to ten minutes for that part. Your first assignments reach the panel within thirty to forty-five minutes — the plugin and the device each check for new work every fifteen minutes — so the screen fills in a little after you finish, not the moment you do.
- Power input
- USB-C, 5V · works with any phone or laptop charger
- Idle draw
- ~0.4W (roughly a tenth of a Wi-Fi router)
- Network
- 2.4GHz Wi-Fi · WPA2 Personal · WPA2 Enterprise (eduroam) (username/password authentication)
- Setup
- Device: captive portal on first boot, Wi-Fi only, ~90 seconds · then the browser plugin on your laptop (no app to install on your phone)
- Recovery
- Hold all four buttons for 10 seconds to reset
Updated while you sleep.
Margin runs a small Linux-based dashboard with a pluggable theme system. Updates check once a day, around 4 AM local time, and apply only if the integrity check passes. You'll see nothing. The device just refreshes with the new version on the next regular cycle.
The five themes that ship in the box are the start, not the end. The theme system is pluggable, so new themes arrive the same way fixes do — in a daily update — and more will follow after the first fifty ship.
- Operating system
- Linux (Raspberry Pi OS Lite, headless)
- Dashboard
- Python · pluggable theme system (five themes ship by default)
- Data path
- Browser plugin writes to Todoist; device reads from Todoist (assignments are never stored or read on a Margin server · our sync service holds a small amount of account and device data, never your tasks)
- Requirements
- Free Todoist account (why we picked Todoist)
- Updates
- Daily over-the-air, 4 AM local · signed manifests · automatic rollback on failure
- Privacy
- No analytics. No usage tracking. Error diagnostics only — redacted on your machine, off switch in Settings → Diagnostics. No assignment data on any server we run.
The boring trust bit.
We back every device with a one-year limited warranty against manufacturing defects. If something breaks in normal use within the first year, we repair or replace it. No hoops, no proof-of-purchase scavenger hunt.
- Price
- Expected $189 (final number set at the Kickstarter launch · the parts run about $80; the rest is us mending it when your school changes Canvas — the full math →)
- Warranty
- 1 year, limited (covers manufacturing & component defects)
- Returns
- 30 days, full refund (device must arrive in working condition; you cover return shipping)
- Repairs
- We repair them ourselves, in small batches
- Right to repair
- Schematics and 3D-print files for the case (STL) published after the first fifty ship
Tested before it ships. Numbered on the back.
Join the waitlist