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E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi

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41–50 of 171 posts

Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi

#41

Nice, 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…

[deleted]

Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi

#42
post #36

Why not use a raspberry pi connected to an hdtv to display this, weather, news, etc.? You could make one HDMI port the "what's happening" channel. Plus run pinhole.

This looks like a desk calendar. e-ink is low power, allowing you to build a portable unit running on battery. And it has it own distinctive look, which some may prefer. Though yeah, an hdtv version would be lot functional.

Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi

#43
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does ESP32 compare to the products you listed?

ESP32 is a very generic synthesized chip, not particularly ULP oriented. On other hand, it's the most developer friendly company out there. I've been unsuccessful getting any proper reaction from Innophase about SDK support. Their sales seem to not even understand what we are wanting from them, and keep sending us "enter these AT commands through USB-TTL" ESP32 is also pretty much the one, and only wireless MCU you c…

> ESP32 is a very generic synthesized chip, not particularly ULP oriented.

Maybe not, but setting it up to sleep most of the time and only boot once a day to fetch the calendar and update the display should sip power pretty sparingly; I expect you'd get months if not a year or more before needing to recharge the battery.

Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi

#44

Nice, 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?

You don't really need to "hibernate"; shutting the entire system down and booting from scratch on each update is simpler and probably more reliable.

The problem (hibernate or not) is getting the Pi to wake up, since it doesn't have a real-time clock. OP is using a RTC hat to achieve this. I do wonder what kind of power consumption it uses while sleeping.

Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi

#46

Heh 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.

That is not clever. That is horrifying.

You have just massively bloated your set of dependencies to accomplish something you could have done with a rudimentary GUI toolkit.

Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi

#47

Heh 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.

I use Python Imaging Library + Seaborn to push out a bar chart bitmap representing some PiHole statistics to this: https://thepihut.com/products/inky-impression-7-colour-epape...

Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi

#48

Heh 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.

I use Python Imaging Library + Seaborn to push out a bar chart bitmap representing some PiHole statistics to this: https://thepihut.com/products/inky-impression-7-colour-epape...

Ah nice. Yeah I'm looking for the right display for my skymap that shows the sun and moon and planets as they track across the sky. It's fun to see the sun curve change with the seasons. Would be way better to have on 7 color eink in the living room than on my phone or laptop.

This one looks good. Are there any that are like 3 inches bigger with borderline similar price points?

Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi

#49
post #35

Can’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!

These projects have a pleasant "lo-fi zen" aspect that makes them attractive, I think. They are simple, provide value yet fade into the background without sucking your attention like some other gadgets.

Probably that's why you can't make money on it at scale that you can with any addictive type of device and so it's not attractive for most entrepreneurs - a lot of work to put in and not enough money to even buy a Cessna.

Re: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi

#50
post #46

Heh 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.

That is not clever. That is horrifying. You have just massively bloated your set of dependencies to accomplish something you could have done with a rudimentary GUI toolkit.

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil”—Donald Knuth.
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