I would love to build something like this but the price of these screens is insane :(
E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
21–30 of 171 posts
Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does ESP32 compare to the products you listed?
I find the ESP32 much easier to develop for, you don't need to install any toolchains, just plug in and drop code into the virtual USB drive that shows up! I wish all microcontrollers were like that these days.
That sounds like a very specific bootloader that you're using
ESP-IDF is still very nice though, and being CMake based makes it easy to integrate outside code
It supports serial based uploads, which are still pretty nice with the bundled serial monitor (one key combo to build, upload, and restart) and OTA uploads
Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does ESP32 compare to the products you listed?
I find the ESP32 much easier to develop for, you don't need to install any toolchains, just plug in and drop code into the virtual USB drive that shows up! I wish all microcontrollers were like that these days.
How do you handle SSL? I found this very cumbersome in my experiments with esp32
Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
#24i’ve thought about this a lot because i use a whiteboard on my fridge. i would do this if it was huge like my whiteboard. like 2ft by 3ft. then i can read each day at a glance. seeing the whole month is huge. and writing on it means it should be a touch screen i find myself wanting larger displays than is for sale a lot. i want an electric photo frame but not some 12in screen. i have great photos i want to see them 4…
Might be cheaper to put a printer on top of your fridge and automatically print calendar every morning into a plexiglass holder :-)
Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
#25Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
#26Nice, but I can't think of less power-efficient embedded platform than an RPi. Especially with something as low power as E-Ink (zero power when displaying). Innophase T2, Dialog DA16200, RedPines (SiLabs) RS9116, RealTek Ameba... they all are super low power (like 100x less than RPi) even while maintaining the 802.11 association, and come with easy SDKs ready for REST HTTPS out of the box (and RTC capabilities, not s…
Can you keep RPi most of the time hibernated? Does it still draw a lot of power in sleep?
This very article shows how they use another product that just turns on the pi on a schedule (once a day) to render the updated calendar.
Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
#27Nice, but I can't think of less power-efficient embedded platform than an RPi. Especially with something as low power as E-Ink (zero power when displaying). Innophase T2, Dialog DA16200, RedPines (SiLabs) RS9116, RealTek Ameba... they all are super low power (like 100x less than RPi) even while maintaining the 802.11 association, and come with easy SDKs ready for REST HTTPS out of the box (and RTC capabilities, not s…
Can you keep RPi most of the time hibernated? Does it still draw a lot of power in sleep?
I don't think it has a hibernate mode, but it has been a quite a hwile since I've downloaded the latest headless server build.
I am currently reading 428mA at 5.0V on the power supply that is driving it. It is headless and I'm not interacting with it. (400mA w/ethernet unplugged). So that's 2W. I'm running Buster Debian build. If you got a low power command, hit me with it and I'll try it! systemctl doesn't support hibernate. I don't do any low power linux programming mainly because Cortex-A class processors (heck, even M7's) are already far outside my power budget.
That is a crazy amount of power, compared to the InnoPhase T2 that draws ~300 MICRO Watts when connected and sleeping.
Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the ESP32 much easier to develop for, you don't need to install any toolchains, just plug in and drop code into the virtual USB drive that shows up! I wish all microcontrollers were like that these days.
How do you handle SSL? I found this very cumbersome in my experiments with esp32
It depends on whether you want to connect to random hosts or ones that you know beforehand. The latter is very easy, I just hardcode the certificate fingerprint. The former/dealing with CAs is harder, I've never done it.
Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
#29Heh that's cool. It renders the calendar as HTML and then uses selenium to open up headless chrome and screenshot it and then send the bitmap to the eink display. Clever.
there has to be a simpler way to draw a grid. there has to.
Sure. But this approach sounds like a sensible base to quickly whip up all sorts of little projects.
Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
#30Can’t explain why but all these E-Ink projects are so awesome and attractive to me. I’m surprised I can’t just buy a bunch of E-Ink style gizmos from some company to decorate my home and office. My wallet would be wide open to it constantly. Great work and congrats on this!
I’m sorry to have to let you know your wallet may empty if you have not seen this already:
[edit: 4.7” ESP32 based epaper display with touchscreen, built in battery and expansion ports]
https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-...