Things people ask.

Margin reads Canvas directly through the browser plugin. Other platforms — Blackboard, D2L, Moodle — connect through the calendar (iCal) feed your school publishes, which you paste in once during setup; between them that covers most US universities. So far we've tested two campuses: UIUC (Canvas, direct) and NIU (Blackboard via its calendar feed, in beta).

If your school runs one of those platforms, it'll almost certainly work. But we test each campus before listing it as supported, because small differences in how schools configure their LMS can break things in unexpected ways. If your school isn't on the list, see the next question.

Email us at hello@margin.computer with your school name and which LMS it uses. We add new schools in batches, roughly in order of waitlist demand: the more signups a campus has, the sooner it gets prioritized.

Realistic timeline: weeks, not days. We need to set up an account on each new campus to verify the integration before we list it as supported.

Yes. Margin supports WPA2-Enterprise Wi-Fi, which covers eduroam and most campus networks. The first-time setup is a small captive portal on the device itself: connect from your phone, enter your school credentials, and you're done.

One thing to know: some universities require you to register your device's MAC address through their IT portal before it can join the network. If that's the case, Margin shows your MAC right on the screen during setup so you can copy it over.

When you sign into Canvas (or whichever LMS your school uses) in your browser, our plugin reads the assignment list from the page and writes those assignments directly to your Todoist, into the project you mapped that course to. Your device then reads from Todoist on every refresh.

Your task titles never pass through a Margin server. We do run a small sync service; it stores your account email, your plan, your device's settings, and your Todoist token (encrypted), never your tasks or calendars. The browser plugin signs into your Todoist account on your laptop, and the device signs into the same account on your desk. We're never in the middle of your assignment data.

You never log into anything new on the LMS side. The plugin uses your existing session with your school's LMS, the same way you read it. We don't see your password, we don't store it, and we don't proxy it.

Not at launch. The browser plugin is Chrome-only at launch. That includes Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, and other Chromium-based browsers, which covers most students.

Firefox and Safari support is planned but won't be ready for batch one. Setup runs through the Chrome plugin just once; after that the device works on its own. If you'd rather not install Chrome even for that, the native Safari and Firefox plugins are on the way.

Calendars: anything that publishes an iCal feed. That's nearly every calendar app worth using: Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook, Proton Calendar, Fastmail, Notion calendars, even your school's official academic calendar if they publish one. You paste the share link into setup, and the events show up on the device.

Tasks: Todoist. Required, not optional. The whole data pipeline runs through Todoist now. Your LMS assignments get written into your Todoist as tasks, one project per course, and the device reads from Todoist on every refresh. Completed tasks sync both ways, priorities and labels come through, the colors you set in Todoist follow the assignments to the device.

If you live in TickTick, Things, Apple Reminders, or Notion tasks, Margin won't work for you yet. A second pipeline for those is on the post-batch-one roadmap, but we're not committing to a date. If you don't want a free Todoist account, this isn't the right time to buy one. Why Todoist specifically →

Because we picked one tool and built everything around it. The browser plugin writes your class portal's assignments directly into your Todoist; the device reads from Todoist on every refresh. Your assignments never flow through a Margin server, by design.

That buys you three things at once. Your assignments live in a real planner you can open on a phone, a laptop, or a watch, not just on the e-paper screen. We never see your task titles, because they don't pass through anything we run. And if Margin ever disappears, your tasks stay in Todoist with no migration to do.

Why Todoist specifically and not Things, TickTick, or Apple Reminders? We needed a service with a stable, well-documented API; an EU-based, GDPR-compliant operator; a long operating history; and a free tier that's enough for a typical student schedule. Doist has been independent since 2007, and the Todoist API is one of the best-documented in its category. The free tier is enough for four to six courses, which is most semesters.

Not for everyone. If you don't want a Todoist account, or you live deeply in another task app, this isn't the right product yet. Other task backends are on the post-batch-one roadmap, but we're not committing to a date.

Yes. And it's the part of the new pipeline that does the most quiet work. During setup, you map each LMS course to a Todoist project of your choosing. From then on, every assignment from CS 225 lands in your CS 225 project. Every problem set from PHYS 211 lands in PHYS 211.

Mapping is manual, not automatic. We don't create new Todoist projects on your behalf. If you already have a project layout in Todoist that works for you, you keep it: a Margin device slots into your existing system instead of imposing a new one. Five courses, five mappings, one time.

On the device, the cycle button switches between today, the week ahead, and a study-plan view that paces out what's coming. Same tasks, three lenses, and the course label and color you set in Todoist ride along in every one.

Switching schools is easy. Re-run setup with the new campus and the device picks up the new LMS. No data lock-in, no account migration.

For a gap year or after graduation, the device still works fine for personal use: it'll keep showing your Google Calendar and any tasks you add through Todoist. The LMS sync just goes quiet because there's nothing to sync.

Better answer than it used to be.

Almost none of your data is on our servers. We run a small sync service that holds your account email, your plan, your device's settings, and your Todoist token (encrypted), never your assignments. Your assignments live in Canvas. Your calendar lives in Google Calendar (or wherever you keep it). Your tasks, including the ones the plugin pulled from your class portal, live in your Todoist. The browser plugin and the device sign into those services directly, using your own accounts. We're never in the middle of your assignment data. If Margin disappears, nothing of yours goes with us.

The hardware itself keeps working. The screen keeps showing whatever it last synced. The device can still read directly from Todoist for as long as Todoist supports the API. The buttons still cycle through themes.

If we ever wind Margin down, here's what we'll do:

• Give you at least six months of advance notice before turning anything off.
• Publish the browser plugin's source so anyone with technical skills can keep the LMS scraper going.
• Publish the device firmware so the hardware stays useful even without our involvement.

We'd rather tell you the truth about a small operation than pretend to be a Fortune 500 with promises we can't keep. If "indie hardware" feels like too much risk for the price, that's a fair reason to wait for batch two, when we'll have a year of operating history to point to.

Fair question. We've put Todoist at the center of the pipeline, so changes on their side hit us.

Doist has been independent and stable since 2007. They aren't venture-backed, they aren't trying to flip to a buyer, and their developer documentation has more or less the same shape today as it did five years ago. That's the steadiest bet we could find in this category. It's still a bet.

If Doist changes the API in a way that breaks us, we'll patch the plugin and the device firmware within whatever window the change allows. If Doist eventually puts API access behind a paywall, we'll tell you, we'll write a migration to whatever the best alternative is at that moment, and we'll open-source anything we can to let you keep running on your own. The commitments in "What happens if Margin shuts down" cover this case too.

Worst case: Doist goes away entirely. Your tasks are still in Todoist's export format, which is open, and any modern task app can import them. You'd lose the device's auto-sync until we shipped a new backend, but you wouldn't lose your assignments.

Short version: into your Todoist, and onto your device. The browser plugin reads your class portal, writes the assignments into the Todoist project you mapped that course to, and the device reads from Todoist on every refresh. No Margin server holds your assignments: not for storage, not for transit, not for caching. What our sync service does keep is your account email, your plan, your device's settings, and your Todoist token (encrypted), so it can hand the token to your device; it never sees your task titles.

That means Doist (the company behind Todoist) is now a data processor for your academic data. Their privacy practices are at doist.com/privacy. They're EU-based, GDPR-compliant, and have been operating since 2007. We picked them because their privacy posture matches ours.

The honest version of the trade. Your task titles never touch anything Margin runs — they move from your class portal to your Todoist to your device, and our sync service never sees them. What our sync service does hold is your Todoist token, encrypted, so it can hand a copy to your device. That token can read your Todoist, which means we won't pretend the architecture makes reading your assignments impossible: we hold the key, so it comes down to encryption at rest, a token we use only to keep your sync working — identifying your Todoist account and refreshing access — never to read your tasks, and never logged in the clear, and our word. Mitch could technically point that token at your Todoist. He doesn't, and there's no code path that reads your tasks — but it's policy and design holding that line, not a law of physics. If that trade isn't good enough for you, you can skip the device-provisioning step and type the token straight into the device instead; then it never reaches us at all.

Not yet. The dashboard and the browser plugin are both kept private during alpha. Things still change weekly, and shipping half-finished code into the world creates more support work than it saves.

We'll revisit this once the first fifty ship and the codebase stabilizes. If you want to be notified when that happens, the waitlist is the place.

Because the whole point is that it's not on your phone. An app shares a screen with every other app, and the other apps are better funded. Margin sits on the desk, where it can't take you anywhere else. There is no anywhere else. A glance costs a second and hands you the day.

An app's job is to keep you. Margin's job is to let you go.

Better Canvas is a free Chrome extension that improves the look of Canvas: dark mode, a cleaner to-do list, a GPA calculator. Thousands of students use it and it's worth installing. It's not what we're trying to do.

Margin solves three problems Better Canvas doesn't:

• Multi-LMS. Better Canvas only works on Canvas. If your school runs Blackboard or D2L (or your courses are split across two platforms, which happens more than you'd think), Margin pulls everything into one place. Your assignments shouldn't care which platform your professor picked.
• Off the laptop. Better Canvas requires Canvas to be the active tab in your open browser. Margin sits on your desk and shows your list whether your laptop is open or not. That's the entire pitch. One honest caveat: new assignments reach the device through the browser plugin, so it pulls them in whenever Chrome is running — you don't need Canvas as the active tab, but you do need to open your laptop now and then to keep the list current. Leave it closed for a week and the device holds the last thing it synced. (A laptop-free sync path is on the roadmap.)
• One screen, not five. Better Canvas only shows you Canvas. Margin unifies your assignments, your calendar, and Todoist on the same surface. No tab-switching, no app-juggling.

If your only class portal is Canvas, your laptop is always open, and you don't mind a tab in your browser doing the work, Better Canvas is free and it's good. That's a fair reason not to need Margin.

Yes, you could. There's an open-source project called InkyPi that runs on the same hardware Margin uses: a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and a Waveshare e-paper screen. The parts cost about $80. There's even a YouTube tutorial that walks you through it.

Here's the part the tutorial doesn't mention. Of the people who've told us they'll DIY one, every one we've heard from is still in the middle of it. None of them has a finished one on their desk.

The build is a weekend. The maintenance is the rest of your semester. Re-writing the Canvas scraper every time UIUC ships a DOM change. Rebuilding the image pipeline when the panel firmware quietly bumps a version. Fighting the eduroam sign-in screen every time you move dorms. Patching the cron job that drifts on daylight savings. That's where the project dies.

We do that work for you. That's the product, not the parts list. If you're the kind of person who'd genuinely enjoy fighting all of that, you'll enjoy building one more than buying one. And you should. If you'd rather plug something in and have it still work in April, that's where we come in.

Two reasons. First, it doesn't glow, which means it doesn't fight your laptop or your lamp for visual attention. It just sits there, like a sheet of paper that updated itself.

Second, e-paper draws zero current between refreshes. The whole device runs on about as much power as a Wi-Fi router's standby mode. You can leave it plugged in all semester without thinking about it.

Because the device's job is to be a glance, not a display. A bigger screen invites more content. More content turns it back into a phone. 5.83" lets us show today's tasks, this week ahead, and a small status footer. That's the right amount of information for the second of attention you give it when you walk past your desk.

Margin is a desk object, not a portable one. A battery would add cost, weight, charging anxiety, and an end-of-life replacement problem. None of that is worth it for a device that will live four feet from a power outlet.

USB-C means it works with the cable and charger you already have. Plug it in, walk away, leave it for a year.

Yes to all three, eventually. Margin is built around a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with off-the-shelf parts. There's no glue, no proprietary chips, nothing magical inside. After the first fifty ship, we plan to publish the schematics and the case STLs so you can repair, modify, or fully replace the software.

Right to repair is the default here, not a feature we charge extra for.

Margin Pass is the software tier: $19.99 for a semester, and it does not auto-renew. It unlocks the real one-click Todoist export, multi-LMS auto-capture, whole-semester foresight past the LMS calendar's roughly two-week horizon, the calm side-panel, and change-tracking when a professor moves a date. There's also a free Preview that renders a parsed syllabus and a mockup of export, so you can see the calm before you pay.

It's a pass, not a trap. Nothing bills your card again on its own. When the term ends, we send one honest email and let it lapse. If you'd rather stop paying every term, the device includes the software — that's the rung where the paying stops.

And the part that matters most: paying changes nothing about where your coursework lives. Your syllabi, assignments, and due dates are parsed and kept on your own machine and never reach a Margin server. The pass is a license check, not a pipe to our servers. The pricing page lays out all three rungs.

Pre-orders open in 2027 through a small Kickstarter campaign. Drop your email on the waitlist and we'll write the day pre-orders go live. No newsletter, no marketing blasts, just one email when there's something to act on.

Device pricing lands with the Kickstarter announcement. The number we're building toward is $189. The software — Margin Pass, $19.99 a semester — and the full ladder are on the pricing page. The first fifty ship to the US and Canada in summer 2028; international shipping comes with the second run.

Yes. For a parent, grandparent, or older sibling buying for a college student, a desk object that doesn't add to phone use is a better gift than another app. We wrote a longer note for the people buying one this way.

We'll add a gift-wrap option for the second batch. For the first batch, the kraft cardboard packaging is unmarked enough to wrap directly.

Because each one is hand-assembled and numbered before it ships. Fifty is the number we can build, test, and stand behind without compromising quality on the first run. Larger runs come as the assembly process gets more repeatable; the first fifty are intentionally small so we can get every unit right before scaling up.

Not in the first fifty. We're starting with US and Canada because customs, voltage standards, and warranty servicing are all simpler when we don't have to handle them yet.

If you're outside North America and want one, get on the waitlist anyway. We want to know how many people we'd be shipping to before committing.

One-year limited warranty against manufacturing defects. Thirty-day returns from delivery. The full terms live on the specs page.

Mitch Ring. A physics major at the University of Illinois. Margin started as a script that pulled assignments off seven different websites (Canvas, Blackboard, PrairieLearn, Moodle, two Google calendars, and Todoist) and printed them onto a thirty-dollar e-paper screen because he was tired of opening five tabs every morning.

That's still the idea. The website is just here to find other people with the same problem.

Two reasons. The first is the literal red line down the side of every sheet of college-ruled paper. That line is the brand identity and the visual signature of the device.

The second is what students actually use the margin for: a place to write down what's due, so the rest of the page is free for the work itself. Margin is meant to be where you keep what you have to remember. Leaving the rest of your day clear.

Not currently. Margin is independent and unfunded by design. Every dollar from pre-orders goes back into parts and tooling for the next run. The operation is deliberately small: small enough that one person answers every email, large enough to ship, service, and stand behind every unit we make. If that ever changes, we'll say so.

Not in the traditional sense. But if you're a student who wants to test Margin on your campus's class portal, write a theme, photograph the device, or help with anything in between, email hello@margin.computer and tell us what you'd want to do. We're not staffing up yet, but we have units to share, and we'd rather get them to people who care than people who don't.