Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also a thing in Australian Libraries (especially those in capital cities). You can book the machines/stations out for periods of time, using your library card/account. You have to do a safety induction to be able to book the more dangerous tools. They also sell materials, or you can BYO.
I've never seen these, do you know of any in Sydney? A quick Google turns up some 3d printing services in other towns/cities but nothing like this
Building an e-ink weather display for our home
51–60 of 118 posts
Re: Building an e-ink weather display for our home
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Be aware that those 3 color screens are very slow to update, 15-20 seconds. I just did a project with one. You are right, the three (or more) colour screens do indeed have very slow update cycles, and they usually don't support partial refresh either (just updating part of the screen) BUT there are some tricks you can do. You can start most of them in two-colour mode, which does support partial updates, and you can…
I wasn't aware that you could only update BW like that in a faster way, I don't remember such API on waveshare ones. Maybe they don't have that, or maybe it is not something officially supported and part of public API
So yeah, the good-display screen and the waveshare ones I think are the exact same hardware, not really sure 100% on that. I wasn't really using an API, I just used the SPI interface directly and implemented my own API on top (in fact I made a simple TLV protocol over USB to drive the RP2040 zero, which then performs the right SPI magic to drive the chip in the display which then.... the number of processors in this setup seems excessive)
Effectively I had to piece together some clues. There was the manual for the screen which gave the definition of the SPI protocol in use, and the commands you could send, what they did, screen startup sequence etc. They mentioned waveforms and modes a bit but it was frustratingly incomplete and it looked like there were gaps in the commands described. Then there was a youtube video of a guy showing how he'd implemented fast refresh on some other model of screen by uploading custom waveforms, who mentioned looking for waveforms in sample code and for chip specifications. This lead me to the original docs for the driver chip on my display (an ultrachip UC8179) which had the missing commands specified. Using these along with the waveform (LUT) definitions supplied by the vendor when I asked them for some, allowed me to make the fast mode.
I presume some commands were missed out of the vendor document as a lot of them were non-essential, and possibly could cause harm(?). Certainly the wrong waveforms could lead to poor performance or no performance. Also the chip spec document didn't give some of the higher level "Here is the startup sequence for your screen" flow chart niceties of the vendor doc.
(The waveforms are literally describing how the screen should apply voltages to transition a pixel from one colour to another. The default ones that the screen ships with are good for a 'full' refresh of the pixel, but you can get away with a lot fewer, faster voltage switches for B/W, at the cost of quality declining over time, which you reset with a periodic 'full' refresh)
Re: Building an e-ink weather display for our home
#53If this kind of device would come in 'off the shelf' ready to go, I'd buy one. I think e-Ink screens are really attractive to be hung on the wall. I hope we're going to see such device come to life; my bet is some successful kickstarter followed by an amazon clone with alexa built-in :vomit-face: +1 for a simple device that does one thing, and does it well.
I use an old ipad combined with DAK Board. No real setup required other than setting up DAK Board how you like and creating a full-screen shortcut to the page on the ipad so it shows borderless.
Re: Building an e-ink weather display for our home
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also a thing in Australian Libraries (especially those in capital cities). You can book the machines/stations out for periods of time, using your library card/account. You have to do a safety induction to be able to book the more dangerous tools. They also sell materials, or you can BYO.
I've never seen these, do you know of any in Sydney? A quick Google turns up some 3d printing services in other towns/cities but nothing like this
Darling Square has "The Exchange"[1] which has Solder stations, 3D printers and a laser cutter but I'm unsure how to book time with them. Might be worth giving the library a call.
[1]: https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/talks-courses-workshops/...
Re: Building an e-ink weather display for our home
#55I found this guide to converting an old Kindle 4 to display anything from the web super useful. https://matthealy.com/kindle I bought another 3 used kindles for $20 each after getting it to work.
Can also be done with an used B&N Nook. After rooting it, you can use the Android OS underneath to install a weather app.
Re: Building an e-ink weather display for our home
#56cool, but these : https://www.homedepot.com/pep/La-Crosse-Technology-Atomic-Di... are super cheap, last forever and don't require an internet connection. Sure you don't get multi day weather but that's what the weather widget on my phohne is for.
That's quite limiting though. The OP could very well expand functionality to hook up calendars, email notifications, etc. This is just a dumb display.
Re: Building an e-ink weather display for our home
#57I'd love to see a display of absolute humidity for indoors and outdoors to see if opening the windows will reduce or increase indoor humidity.
Re: Building an e-ink weather display for our home
#58I have no idea how this is not get a commercial product. Our Google Nest Home Max Hub Whatever screen that I got free from CES is garbage at displaying useful information. The weather info can’t sync at least once per week, requiring a restart. It’s literally just our bathroom clock / Bluetooth speaker because that’s all it’s good for. It cannot sync to Google Apps (business account) calendars. The proposed solution is to use IFTTT to duplicate GApps accounts to your personal account, then sync it to that. That is, frankly, embarrassing for Google IMO.
I built a MagicMirror-based Pi setup with a little 7” Lilliput screen and it works so much better, but it’s sad that over the past few decades we still haven’t solved this problem of a customizable smart home dashboard that actually works and yet does not require a CS degree to operate.
Re: Building an e-ink weather display for our home
#59> Many existing projects used lower level libraries such as Python Imaging Library, but I opted for HTML and CSS. The development is fast when you can edit the HTML and immediately see the result without rendering a raster image after each iteration.
I'd like link to Slint [https://github.com/slint-ui/slint] It has a live preview mode so you can iterate fast on the UI, and it is much more lightweight than HTML, so you could even run it bare metal on a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040)
Re: Building an e-ink weather display for our home
#60If this kind of device would come in 'off the shelf' ready to go, I'd buy one. I think e-Ink screens are really attractive to be hung on the wall. I hope we're going to see such device come to life; my bet is some successful kickstarter followed by an amazon clone with alexa built-in :vomit-face: +1 for a simple device that does one thing, and does it well.
I have an eink internal thermometer/hydrometer I bought off the shelf. Hooks up to wifi if you wanna log, works fine without it. Runs off 3 double as. The brand is govee, I don't know the rules on linking to Amazon so I'll refrain. Search Govee Eink.
They seem to be trying to limit full refreshes but they're very distracting when they happen, suggest keeping it out of eye line.