Great work and congrats on this!
I’d love to have this, art, and other “appliances” and slabs with eink. Ex. My todo list. My email etc.
see for example: https://github.com/Neelakurinji123/kindle-weather-display
the mobileread forum ist full of good information e.g.: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=267541
Now I need to press hard with a needles to make the serial port work - so it is quite hard to setup - at least until I install sshd there and setup wifi to make it work wirelessly.
https://rahulrav.com/blog/e_ink_dashboard.html
Rahul got oauth2 flows working to get google calendar access.
Used it in this thing: https://github.com/lawik/calendar_gadget
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.
[edit: 4.7” ESP32 based epaper display with touchscreen, built in battery and expansion ports]
https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-...
You can get small e-ink screens (without a HAT, requires adapter ~10$ and dev board which is necessary anyway) for much cheaper.
5.8 inch is 40$
800×480, 7.5inch 50$
400x300, 4.2inch E-Ink raw display, three-color 26$
The cheaper ones are cheap because:
1) Each size comes in a low res and a high res variant, the low res ones are a lot cheaper
2) No HAT, so no built-in dev board for the PI. You do need to somehow connect it to your dev board. An adapter with SPI costs 10$, a dev board with esp8266 that has built-in adapter costs ~18$. Both are officially from wave share available on their site as well
3) All boards below 7 inch are relatively affordable. After that the price increases are huge
4) Not sure why, but price difference between black/white and 3-color is negligible. So feel free to pick a 5 inch tricolor screen for like 40$!
For this type of project the esp32 seems like the better choice than the pi zero.
There’s also the RP2040 if you want work in the pi ecosystem. Arduino and u-blox have those with wifi I think
Watch out for a few things:
1. Refreshes are much slower on 3-color eInk panels than on monochrome ones (eg: 20 sec vs 2)
2. Partial refresh on 3-color panels is rare and quickly gets messy around the edges. Partial refresh on monochrome panels is a relatively simple thing to do.
3. Greyscale on a 3-color eInk screen is VERY VERY VERY hard! Officially it is not supported at all. By any 3-color panel. I made it work [1] but even then, it is very very slow (bordering on a full minute per refresh).
4. Stock waveforms are rarely good. And almost no vendor will give you proper temp-compensated partial update waveforms. Developing your own waveforms for monochrome panels is easy and simple (~day). Developing your own waveforms for 3-color panels is a lot of work (~weeks + more weeks once you need to support more than just "21-25 celsius")
[1] http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=29.%20eInk%20Price%20Ta...
e-ink is the perfect blend between technology (screen can display whatever you want) and the analogue/physical world (it looks like a piece of paper which you can put in a wooden frame and interact with).
Another example for me is the “Buddha Machine” by FM3 (https://www.fm3buddhamachine.com): it’s basically a box that plays some ambient loops (technology) but it looks like a small and unthreatening transistor radio with nice tactile buttons (physical).
Ambient Executive Dashboard | Uncrate https://uncrate.com/ambient-executive-dashboard/
A new version that uses WiFi instead of a defunct paging network would be nice.
Plans to mod original ones so the meters could be driven by a micro-controller or Raspberry Pi would be cool.
https://e-radionica.com/en/inkplate-29.html
The project, found on hn: https://rahulrav.com/blog/e_ink_dashboard.html
...from the same guy who did this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284