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 sure about the ameba).
ESP-IDF is still very nice though, and being CMake based makes it easy to integrate outside code
It supports serial based uploads, which are still pretty nice with the bundled serial monitor (one key combo to build, upload, and restart) and OTA uploads
EDIT: grammar and typos.
The question, of course, is: What if these CAs expire?
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 can buy on the open market, in any quantity, on a short notice. Nothing else comes with the supply chain security like this.
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.
I am currently reading 428mA at 5.0V on the power supply that is driving it. It is headless and I'm not interacting with it. (400mA w/ethernet unplugged). So that's 2W. I'm running Buster Debian build. If you got a low power command, hit me with it and I'll try it! systemctl doesn't support hibernate. I don't do any low power linux programming mainly because Cortex-A class processors (heck, even M7's) are already far outside my power budget.
That is a crazy amount of power, compared to the InnoPhase T2 that draws ~300 MICRO Watts when connected and sleeping.
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.
I don't like that it takes headless chrome to render, but it _works_ and fills a need for the maker.
I'm pretty sure they looked at the stuff they'd need to write (A layout engine, a anti aliasing library, a calendar parsing library, an image handling library) and thought "fuck that, lets use a pi".
It terms of time thats weeks full time, and even then might not be possible to fit on the uCPU of choice.
just buy a realtime hat with wake up ability, for $40 max, boom job done moving to making the thing look good.
Its not a product, its someone's hobby, leave them be.
Did you see the rendering? It is very simple, and does not require PIL. There are plenty of embedded GUI libraries that are specifically for this kind of application (uFX, Qt). Why not learn something new?
I want HN to be a place where experts critique ideas, not a Facebook/Instagram like-fest ego-stroke. I was proposing a deeper dive to the OP so that s/he could develop better skills. I wasn't mocking OP, but I was mocking your bad idea because you didn't make anything, you just threw out a naive suggestion.
Did you come here to learn or to get some karma for a dopamine hit?
I was critiquing your world view that _everyone_ must at all times go really deep into software so that everything can fit inside 4mbit of flash.
I was also also critiquing your strongly held opinion that simply because a microprocessor has low power states, it doesn't mean that its quick, easy or indeed achievable to render a nice calendar entirely onboard. (it is of course possible, but I know it would take me a lot of time and be no fun.)
Perhaps the goal of the project was to get something that looked nice in a time frame that was reasonable. Perhaps the goal was not to spend time learning how to do antialiasing, font handling, calendar parsing in a power constrained environment.
The joy of the internet is that they have shared their work, now you can build on it and make a good looking eink calendar that's battery powered on some tiny ARM SoC with 4kb of ram.
Whilst you're at it, I propose that you go out of your comfort zone and remake this https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/stock-ticker-machin... to make it purely electro mechanical. it can't be that hard.