I’ve hacked up a TRMNL private plugin to display Hampshire primary school meals. A photo of a TRMNL screen showing the meat, meat free and dessert options for Today(Friday) and Monday in the Hampshire Primary School Catering menu

Dev notes

Code on GitHub https://github.com/engie/menu

  • I originally planned to run a cloudflare worker to fetch menu data live, but that was annoying as the menu website has cloudflare scraping protection. Overall it doesn’t change very often so a simple download, with local scripts to extract the relevant data, ended up much cleaner. You can load a blob of JSON as static data into the TRMNL system, although this failed before I got round to deduping the images (with a 4MB file), at roughly 85KB it’s fine.
  • ChatGPT O3 did a good job of writing the scraping code. I enjoyed first asking ChatGPT to read the site and generate JSON itself, then to write code to do the same, then to compare the outputs & fix any discrepencies. It did a great job for this, and writing scraping code by hand is no fun.
  • I used DALL-E-3 to generate the icons. This went OK, not as good as interactively asking O3 to do so. I may come back to debug this prompt later. Was fun working with O3 on this code, including using the ChatGPT VSCode integration.
  • The HTML template is pretty horrible, fiddly and I was editing it in the TRMNL app. It worked in the end, but overall poor dev experience here.