Bought a TRMNL to act as a read-only SMS client for my 7yo, but it only refreshes every 15m, which is a bummer. 

Anyone know how to coerce faster refresh?

Anyone know of an alternative with more frequent refresh?

Anyone know how to jailbreak them?

Stack: 

https://usetrmnl.com/ hardware ($150ish IIRC)

free tier twilio

free tier neon db (not even strictly necessary, would be fine in memory probably)

pay for what you use fly.io hosting (budgeting pennies per week, will update if it's dramatically more)

Process:

vibe coded via claude code in a few minutes

claude walked me through clicking around in the dashboards and stuff to get everything configured

that part took maybe 45 minutes

I wrote 0.5 lines of code the old fashioned way

the only thing that took any chops or familiarity was figuring out from context that TRMNL expected to consume JSON and then mark it up natively instead of just receiving a complete html page

although there's probably an existing app that lets you just display a webpage and I bet claude could have worked out a solution even if I hadn't flagged that issue

Hackathons must be absolutely bonkers these days 🤯

i hope you never ever ever try to incorporate sending texts back or you’re gonna have to redo the whole stack 😂

i have a mint mobile android phone i use as a sms gateway cause twilio won’t let you do it without a full on audit that doesn’t allow personal situations lol 🙃🙃