Things people ask.

Margin works with Canvas, Blackboard Ultra, D2L Brightspace, and Moodle — which covers the vast majority of US universities. So far we've tested and confirmed two campuses: UIUC (Canvas) and NIU (Blackboard Ultra, in beta).

If your school runs one of those four 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 aligned with new orders — so the more requests we get for a campus, 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 wifi, 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 sends it — along with course names and due dates — to a private relay we run. The relay forwards it to your device the next time it refreshes.

You never log into anything new. The plugin uses your existing session with your school's LMS. We don't see your password, and we don't store it anywhere.

Not at launch. The browser plugin is Chrome-only for the first batch — that includes Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, and other Chromium-based browsers, which covers most students.

Firefox and Safari support are planned but won't be ready for batch one. If your primary browser is Safari or Firefox and you don't want to install Chrome to set up Margin, that's a fair reason to wait for batch two.

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, for now. If Todoist is your system, the integration is direct — completed tasks update both ways, priorities and projects come through, the whole thing works quietly. If you live in TickTick, Things, Apple Reminders, or Notion tasks, you can still use Margin for assignments and calendars, but tasks won't sync until we add support — currently on the post-batch-one roadmap.

If your task app isn't on that list and you don't want to switch, that's a fair reason to wait for batch two.

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.

Fair question, and one we've thought about seriously.

The good news: your underlying data isn't on our servers. Your assignments live in Canvas. Your calendar lives in Google Calendar. Your tasks live in Todoist. We're a relay between those services and your device — not a place where your information is stored. If we disappear, none of your data goes with us.

The hardware itself keeps working. The screen keeps showing whatever it last synced. The buttons still cycle through themes. What stops, if the relay shuts down, is the automatic refresh.

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 relay code so anyone with technical skills can keep it running for themselves or the community.
• 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.

Short version: nowhere it shouldn't. Your assignment titles, due dates, and course codes pass through a private relay we run on Supabase. From there they go straight to your device. No third parties. No analytics. We don't sell anything to anyone, and we never will.

The honest part: your data sits in our database while it's in transit, which means we — practically, just Mitch — could read it. We don't, and there's no commercial reason we ever would. Indie hardware works on indie trust; if that's not comfortable for you, that's a fair reason not to buy one.

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 batch ships 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 on your phone is one swipe from infinite scroll — you open it to check your homework and twenty minutes later you're watching a video about lighthouse keepers. A small object on your desk is a different category of attention. You walk past it. You see one red line. You go back to whatever you were doing.

That separation is the entire product.

Genuinely good question, and worth answering honestly. 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 uses Blackboard, D2L, or both — like most students with one major and one elective in another department — 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 whether your laptop is open or not. That's the entire pitch, really.
• One screen, not five. Better Canvas only shows you Canvas. Margin unifies LMS assignments, your calendar, and Todoist on the same surface. No tab-switching, no app-juggling.

If your only LMS 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. If you have a soldering iron and a free weekend, you can build something close to Margin yourself for less than the retail price.

What you'd be giving up:

• The LMS pipeline. InkyPi's plugins are generic — weather, calendar, photos, GitHub stats. There's no Canvas plugin, no Blackboard plugin. You'd have to write the scrapers yourself, and re-write them every time your school updates their LMS.
• The student-aware UI. Margin renders an Exam Radar, an overdue queue, a project-grouped Quest Board. None of that exists in the generic e-paper dashboard ecosystem. You'd be drawing it from scratch.
• The hands-off part. When your university breaks the Canvas API at 2 AM the night before midterms, we push a fix. With a DIY build, you fix it.

Honestly, if you're the kind of person who'd actually enjoy building one, you'll probably enjoy building one more than buying one. That's also a fair reason not to need Margin. If you'd rather plug something in and have it work, 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 wifi 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. 5.79" 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 — 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 batch ships, 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.

Pre-orders open later this year 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.

Price: $119, plus shipping. The first batch ships to the US and Canada; international shipping comes in batch two.

Because each one is hand-assembled at a kitchen table — and fifty is the number that fits between final projects and the start of summer. Larger batches will come once the assembly process gets less hand-built, but the first batch is intentionally small so we can get every unit right before scaling up.

Not in the first batch. 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.

Yes — and honestly, this is one of the cases the product was made for. For a parent, grandparent, or older sibling buying for a college student, a small object that sits on the desk and doesn't add to phone use is a much better gift than another subscription.

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.

Mitch. A physics freshman 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 essentially what it does. 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 a side project being made by one student at a kitchen table. There's no team, no funding, no investors, no roadmap meeting on Monday. If that ever changes, we'll say so.

For now, every dollar that comes in goes into parts for the next batch.

Not in the traditional sense. But if you're a student who wants to test Margin on your campus's LMS, 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 don't have money to pay anyone yet, but we have units, and we'd rather get them to people who care than people who don't.