reTerminal Sticky: Your Day on E-Paper, Not Your Phone

Checking your plan shouldn’t cost you your focus, but on most days it does. You pick up your phone to see what’s next, and the badges, the unread messages and the feed are all waiting for you before the plan is. The reTerminal Sticky is our answer to that: a small e-paper screen that shows your Fokus day — what you should be doing now, what comes next, and what needs attention — and nothing else. No notifications, no feed, nothing to scroll.

This post covers what the Sticky is, what each screen does, how capture works without touching your phone, how to set one up, and the honest trade-offs.

What the reTerminal Sticky is

The reTerminal Sticky is a device made and sold by Seeed Studio. We build the firmware that turns it into a Fokus companion, and it links to your Fokus account.

The hardware, in short:

a 3.97-inch e-paper touchscreen and three physical buttons
a magnet on the back, so it can stand on your desk or stick to a monitor or a fridge
a microphone for voice capture, a microSD slot and USB-C
2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

It talks to Fokus directly over Wi-Fi. Your phone isn’t part of the loop, which is the point: it can stay in a drawer.

Your day at a glance

The Sticky opens on Day, and Day answers the one question you have when you look up from your work: what should I be doing right now?

A greeting and a count — how many of today’s tasks are left and how many events you still have.
Weather and your room — the forecast for your location, plus the room’s temperature and humidity from the Sticky’s own sensor.
NOW — the task or event you should be on, with a progress bar. All-day events never take this slot, so a colleague’s birthday doesn’t push out your real work.
NEXT — what follows, and when.
Needs attention — the things that will bite if you ignore them, flagged OVERDUE, CONFLICT, AT RISK or ACTION.

Because Fokus schedules your tasks around your meetings, NOW is usually a real block of time rather than the top line of a list. NOW and NEXT move on by themselves as the day goes, even between syncs.

Five more screens, one button away

Screen	What you see	What you can do
Tasks	Up to 20 of your tasks	Tick them done
Calendar	A week strip and your waking hours, hour by hour, with events and scheduled tasks	Accept or decline invitations, when your answer can reach the organiser
Goals	Your objectives by period, with progress and a trend: ON TRACK, AT RISK or BEHIND	Mark a goal completed
Notes	Your 10 most recent notes, with their formatting	Delete a note
Timer	A countdown in minutes and seconds	Start a pomodoro from any task

The controls are simple: A opens or ticks, ▲ and ▼ move, holding ▼ locks the screen, and ▲ + ▼ together power it off. The screen is a touchscreen too, and you can swipe to change the day.

Capture a thought without picking up your phone

The moment you reach for your phone to write something down is often the moment you lose ten minutes. The Sticky gives you two ways around that.

Quick capture — hold A. Say what’s on your mind, for example “send the Q3 update to the investors tomorrow at ten”, and the Sticky proposes a task, an event or a note. Nothing is saved until you press SAVE, and a proposal you don’t answer expires after two minutes. Quick capture uses your Fokus AI budget.

Voice memo — press A twice. It records up to a minute and turns it into a note, and it works offline. Voice memos need the Meeting Scribe add-on.

Anything you do on the device shows on the screen straight away and reaches Fokus at the next sync, so a dropped Wi-Fi connection doesn’t lose it. Up to eight captures can wait for your review under Settings › Captures. If you want a permanent record, an opt-in SD archive keeps every capture and memo as audio with its transcript. It’s off by default, because that’s room audio on a card you can take out of the device.

Why e-paper

A planner you glance at fifty times a day should cost you about as much attention as a sticky note on your monitor. E-paper gets close:

It doesn’t glow. No backlight, no colour, no animation — nothing designed to hold your eye.
It keeps its image without power. Your day stays on the screen while the Sticky sleeps between interactions, and a press wakes it in about a second.
It stays current on its own. It syncs in the background every 15 minutes by default (you can pick 5, 15, 30 or 60), and the clock keeps ticking while it sleeps.
It updates itself at night. New firmware installs inside your sleep window, when the Sticky is plugged in or has at least half its battery.

The trade-off is the other side of the same coin: e-paper refreshes slowly and in black and white. The Sticky is built for glancing, not for reading long notes or reworking your week — that’s what the Fokus app on your laptop and phone is for. Pairing the two is the idea: plan on the big screen, then let the small one keep you on track. It works especially well if you protect deep work blocks and already use a distraction system that doesn’t rely on willpower.

Setting it up

Get the device from Seeed Studio. Buy the reTerminal Sticky. This is an affiliate link, and the voucher code N6F7UG5T takes 5% off.
Install the Fokus firmware from getfokus.com/sticky over USB-C, in Chrome, Edge or Opera on a desktop computer. It doesn’t work in Safari, in Firefox or on a phone. Installing it replaces Seeed’s own firmware; you can put theirs back from Seeed’s official firmware page.
Connect it to Wi-Fi, over the same cable or through the Sticky’s setup hotspot. It needs a 2.4 GHz network.
Link it to your account. The Sticky shows a code like FKS-XXXX-XXX, valid for 15 minutes. Enter it in Fokus under Settings → Devices, or at web.getfokus.com/link-device.

The reTerminal Sticky guide goes through every step and every setting in detail.

Privacy, briefly

There’s no account on the device until you link it.
Your location is used only for the weather.
Quick capture always shows you what it understood before anything is saved.
The SD audio archive is opt-in.
Unlinking — from the device, the web or the phone app — revokes the Sticky’s access immediately and deletes none of your data.

Who it’s for, and its limits

The Sticky is for people who already run their day in Fokus and want the plan in their line of sight without the phone that usually comes with it.

Its limits, plainly:

The device’s own menus are in English. It shows German, Arabic and French titles and notes, but the interface itself isn’t translated.
It needs 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi.
Voice features depend on your AI budget and the Meeting Scribe add-on.
It’s made and sold by Seeed Studio, so the hardware and its warranty come from them.

Fokus itself is free during the public beta.

Quick answers

Does the Sticky need my phone to work? No. It connects to Fokus directly over Wi-Fi.

Does Fokus make or sell the device? No. Seeed Studio makes and sells the reTerminal Sticky. We provide the firmware and everything on the Fokus side.

Can I go back to Seeed’s firmware? Yes. Installing Fokus replaces it, and you can reinstall theirs from Seeed’s official firmware page.

What happens when the Wi-Fi drops? Ticks, captures and memos are applied on the device straight away and synced when the connection is back.

What does it cost to run? Fokus is free during the public beta. Voice memos need the Meeting Scribe add-on, and quick capture uses your AI budget.