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I built a picture frame with a greyscale e-paper that runs on battery for years

framelabs.eu

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Re: I built a picture frame with a greyscale e-paper that runs on battery for years

#72
I bought my first arduino because I wanted information radiators I could just hang on an office wall, without a network cable for sure. And without a power cord if at all possible. I never got far. I could probably build now what I wanted then, but I’m not sure anyone would find it compelling, least of all me.

Re: I built a picture frame with a greyscale e-paper that runs on battery for years

#74
post #68

I found the image server, in the spirit of using your device for fun and interesting things (say nothing of privacy).. Why would you need the online converter, if you selfhost the image-server? (potential customer here, but wanna use it not for pictures but for "daily status")

The images need to be processed before they can be shown:

• Cropping

• Scaling

• Contrast + brightness adjustment

• Compression

That is what the online converter provides.

But I get your point. I will add example code on how to convert an image on your local machine.

Re: I built a picture frame with a greyscale e-paper that runs on battery for years

#76
post #23

I worked on a number of digital photo frames, including on ones like that. E-ink is not the most suitable thing for it in its current form. First, large size EPD cost an arm, and a leg, and custom one costs even more. Second, there are no 8 bit EPD controllers as of now a mortal can buy, which means grays look very bad. Third, there are inherent physical limitations which make increasing gray resolution of EPDs quite…

At what point does it become mandatory to refer to your own age in a self-deprecating way if it happens to come up?

Re: I built a picture frame with a greyscale e-paper that runs on battery for years

#77
post #4
post #2

The title reads like a blog post (great for HN!), but the site link is just a company selling frames. Their byline is: Digital artwork for your living room. New every day. So surely somebody did build a picture frame but this is not an article about that.

Owner here. I initially created it for myself, but there was a lot of interest, so I made a kit available so that everybody can build one, too.

Thanks for responding. I was quite interested really in the concept that the title seemed to indicate, I was expecting a blog post at least, and surely something along those likes would do better on HN

Re: I built a picture frame with a greyscale e-paper that runs on battery for years

#78
post #27
post #23

I worked on a number of digital photo frames, including on ones like that. E-ink is not the most suitable thing for it in its current form. First, large size EPD cost an arm, and a leg, and custom one costs even more. Second, there are no 8 bit EPD controllers as of now a mortal can buy, which means grays look very bad. Third, there are inherent physical limitations which make increasing gray resolution of EPDs quite…

What would you suggest for an affordable picture frame displaying digital art?

If you keep your photos in Google Photos, I found the Nest Hub quite nice, since it automatically rotates among your recent photos

(It also automatically dims or blacks out the display when it's dark)

Re: I built a picture frame with a greyscale e-paper that runs on battery for years

#79
post #51
post #10

I actually built one myself, but used raspberry pi so it needs usb cable for power. It works well but contrast on the display is not that good for photos. Would work well for text or like smart home panel. https://imgur.com/a/HraSGsj

I've built something very similar as well. For me, I found that the display I'm using works reasonably well for photos, but you need to slightly boost the contrast of the image before updating the display, to compensate for the darkness of the display. If you're using PIL in python, this is just something like "image = PIL.ImageEnhance.Contrast(image).enhance(1.3)" I do that immediately before dithering into 16-greys…

I am using simple shell script and imagemagick to convert folder full of images and then randomly rotate the pictures. I tried playing with contrast but after dithering and that did not produce good results.

Re: I built a picture frame with a greyscale e-paper that runs on battery for years

#80
post #68

I found the image server, in the spirit of using your device for fun and interesting things (say nothing of privacy).. Why would you need the online converter, if you selfhost the image-server? (potential customer here, but wanna use it not for pictures but for "daily status")

I would like if you could just set a url pattern that sent over some device specific id and the resolution as parameters and it would poll it on some configurable frequency.
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