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

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

#71

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!

Check out the Inkplate - a great e-ink platform for all these projects and more:

https://inkplate.io/

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People gluing together lots of stuff to making something barely-working and massively inefficient is not a new phenomenon. Unfortunately, all the "maker movement" seems to have done is encourage it more. Careful design, knowledge and learning is being discouraged in favour of superficial understanding, copy-pasting, tweaking-until-it-works. They don't want to spend the time to learn the basics. I was recently saddene…

> Careful design, knowledge and learning is being discouraged in favour of superficial understanding, copy-pasting, tweaking-until-it-works. This is like poo-pooing amatuer woodworking and saying “people should really become an apprentice first” - no one who has the education to do careful engineering is being discouraged, the field of hardware and software is now within reach of people who just wouldn’t take on any…

no one who has the education to do careful engineering is being discouraged

They are, because they think this stuff is just as good --- and it clogs the search results for those who do want to dig deeper. I often have to add "-Arduino -Maker" and a bunch of other filters to my search results to find the actually useful stuff.

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

#74
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.

Why tough? It works. What exactly is wasted here? 100MB for Chrome binary and that few percent of CPU hike while rendering the image? Is it worth wasting endless hours of time researching some niche, quirky, badly documented drawing library, where the hard earned end result has absolutely negligible difference from a human standpoint? Machines work for us, not reverse.

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

#75

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!

i bought the 6" display from eink.com to build a small personal art project - an infinite scrolling procedurally generated landscape based on this project - https://github.com/LingDong-/shan-shui-inf

A few gotchas:

1. some of these eink boards are hard to procure as a consumer. the vendors want you to be a company

2. the driver boards are purchased separately, are definitely required, and sometimes have windows software (vs easy to use rasp-pi drivers)

3. support is often difficult or from the OEM so english-language communication can be difficult.

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

#76

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!

Check out the Inkplate - a great e-ink platform for all these projects and more: https://inkplate.io/

Here's code that works with inkplate from a previous hn post :)

https://rahulrav.com/blog/e_ink_dashboard.html

Rahul got oauth2 flows working to get google calendar access.

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

#77

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.

there has to be a simpler way to draw a grid. there has to.

PostScript, maybe.

Instead of generating HTML from calendar data, generate PS and have Ghostscript convert it to PNG.

I don't know PostScript, and based on the example code in the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#The_language), I was able to get it to draw some text in a few minutes.

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

#78
post #75

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!

i bought the 6" display from eink.com to build a small personal art project - an infinite scrolling procedurally generated landscape based on this project - https://github.com/LingDong-/shan-shui-inf A few gotchas: 1. some of these eink boards are hard to procure as a consumer. the vendors want you to be a company 2. the driver boards are purchased separately, are definitely required, and sometimes have windows softw…

This is very interesting. Do you have a write up on the procedurally generated landscape part?

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

#79
post #16

i’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…

There are 31" and 42" e-ink displays available, but they cost a few thousand dollars. The 42" is pretty close to 2ft by 3ft, 25" x 33".

>There are 31" and 42" e-ink displays available, but they cost a few thousand dollars. The 42" is pretty close to 2ft by 3ft, 25" x 33".

I must have 4 or 5 old Kindles in a drawer by now, somehow. I wonder if you could hack together a grid of old Kindles to make a giant e-ink screen?

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