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Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard

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Re: Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard

#11

Post by nrp »

franciscop wrote: post #4

I almost bought this eink yesterday to test it out, but as I'm seeing here and I thought, it seems a bit small. I am also considering getting a kindle and just putting a small html page on it so I don't have to get down to the pixel-level. I remember when I tried to use my now-defunct kindle that JS was giving some funny errors, probably should be treated as an old browser. Been holding out to see if a usb-c kindle c…

Inkplate may be what you’re looking for, though it isn’t shipping yet: https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6

Re: Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard

#12

Post by gchamonlive »

amelius wrote: post #3

> I realized I was asking Google Assistant the same questions over and over again. Like What’s the current weather? or What’s on my calendar for today? So I set out to build a small dashboard for my Raspberry Pi that I could check instead. Why not use a widget on the home-screen of your phone?

Phones are multi purpose. You do a lot with it and having every piece of information crammed into layers of applications is not the best design.

Some pieces of information, specially those regarding productivity like calendar or a kanban board are better delegated to solutions designed just for that. A whiteboard, a dedicated LCD screen, an eink dashboard controlled by a raspberry pi... Take your pick, as long as it is always visible.

Re: Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard

#14

Post by jayd16 »

amelius wrote: post #3

> I realized I was asking Google Assistant the same questions over and over again. Like What’s the current weather? or What’s on my calendar for today? So I set out to build a small dashboard for my Raspberry Pi that I could check instead. Why not use a widget on the home-screen of your phone?

He made a Google Home Hub but still...its a fun project.

Re: Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard

#15

Post by Jonnax »

I had the exact same idea a few months ago!

Google home is such an uncustomisable waste of time.

I ended up getting a 7.5 inch display from waveshare.

What I want is to know when the trains from my nearby train station leaves.

So I pulled the data off the UK National rail who have a free API.

And got some weather from the openweathermap API.

It updates every 5 minutes (well I turned it off since I'm not going anywhere these days haha)

And it's a super simple python script that uses a simple image drawing library.

Would recommend!

Re: Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard

#16

Post by cmsj »

I have something similar that shows when the next bus is leaving our nearest stop.

I really like it, and I would be tempted to invest in something larger for putting my calendar on the wall in my home office, but the big problem with this sort of thing is that cases are always a disaster.

My bus Pi is in a really janky case because there was only really a couple that would fit with the ePaper display on it.

If I could buy something about A4 size, in a sleek case that I could wall mount nicely, and have good hackability on, I would absolutely do it.

Re: Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard

#17

Post by diabeetusman »

cmsj wrote: post #16

I have something similar that shows when the next bus is leaving our nearest stop. I really like it, and I would be tempted to invest in something larger for putting my calendar on the wall in my home office, but the big problem with this sort of thing is that cases are always a disaster. My bus Pi is in a really janky case because there was only really a couple that would fit with the ePaper display on it. If I coul…

The Remarkable (an e-reader with a pen) is fairly hackable, but it's overkill for a dashboard.

Re: Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard

#18

Post by ben174 »

diabeetusman wrote: post #17
cmsj wrote: post #16

I have something similar that shows when the next bus is leaving our nearest stop. I really like it, and I would be tempted to invest in something larger for putting my calendar on the wall in my home office, but the big problem with this sort of thing is that cases are always a disaster. My bus Pi is in a really janky case because there was only really a couple that would fit with the ePaper display on it. If I coul…

The Remarkable (an e-reader with a pen) is fairly hackable, but it's overkill for a dashboard.

Also very overpriced, imo. But it seems like e-ink displays are expensive in general.

Re: Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard

#19

Post by Cerium »

amelius wrote: post #3

> I realized I was asking Google Assistant the same questions over and over again. Like What’s the current weather? or What’s on my calendar for today? So I set out to build a small dashboard for my Raspberry Pi that I could check instead. Why not use a widget on the home-screen of your phone?

I ask Google Assistant the weather every night just to get it to turn on the little LEDs. They light up the room enough to see where I am walking.

Re: Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard

#20

Post by dmd »

nkozyra wrote: post #7
dmd wrote: post #6

I did something like this too. I definitely chose the wrong e-ink display, it was extremely awful to work with. https://github.com/dmd/wxpaper

Could you expound on the issues you ran into?

There's only one (very bad) font and no way to address pixels. So for everything I wanted to do I had to load bmps (in a bizarre format) into it. Each number is a bmp, for instance.
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