German company Ace Innovation Lab has launched a new personal information dashboard product, Inkycal v3, featuring a Raspberry Pi Zero W SBC with a 7.5-inch tri-color ePaper display, with a thickness of 10mm and weighing less than 150 grams. It offers two tri-color display modes: "black-white-red" and "black-white-yellow".

The inspiration for VU1 comes from a hobbyist project called CAPS, which uses analog gauges to display activity data for network, RAM, CPU, and GPU, and integrates these analog gauges into the Streacom DB4. This project caught the attention of Streacom, who later developed firmware, hardware, and software for the project.