9 ms·

Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard

290 points by nromiun 7y ago

bergie 7y ago
That's cool! I built something similar for our boat with a black and white e-ink screen https://github.com/meri-imperiumi/dashboard https://github.com/meri-imperiumi/dashboard
amelius 7y ago
> I realized I was asking Google Assistant the same questions over and over again. Like What’s the current weather? or What’s on my calendar for today? So I set out to build a small dashboard for my Raspberry Pi that I could check instead. Why not use a widget on the home-screen of your phone?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Not everyone's phone can do that :(
- gchamonlive 7y ago
  Phones are multi purpose. You do a lot with it and having every piece of information crammed into layers of applications is not the best design. Some pieces of information, specially those regarding productivity like calendar or a kanban board are better delegated to solutions designed just for that. A whiteboard, a dedicated LCD screen, an eink dashboard controlled by a raspberry pi... Take your pick, as long as it is always visible.
  - DelightOne 7y ago
    I have the hope that AR fixes this with new glasses and arranging virtual dashboards around the house. The AR technology is already there, only the glasses are missing.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      I.e. AR technology is already there, only AR technology is missing ;). Rendering things is a solved problem. SLAM, arguably, too. But the whole idea of AR is to render synthetic images on top of the view of the real world, and sadly, that still feels very far away. That said, maybe the AR-in-VR will be a good enough stopgap? Turns out, looking at the world through cameras isn't all that bad. I bought Oculus Quest the other day, which uses an array of cameras for SLAM (it's an untethered headset, meaning you can walk around the house with it), and can feed that camera data to you. Originally envisioned as a safety measure (if you leave your defined play area, the VR view transitions to camera pass-through), it's surprisingly good as a way to look at the world in general. Despite being monochrome and low resolution. If somebody can make a Quest-like headset with higher resolution screens and higher resolution, full-color cameras, this would be already halfway-usable AR.
- jayd16 7y ago
  He made a Google Home Hub but still...its a fun project.
- Cerium 7y ago
  I ask Google Assistant the weather every night just to get it to turn on the little LEDs. They light up the room enough to see where I am walking.
  - renewiltord 7y ago
    With smart lights and the assistant, I actually do this as "Hey Google, lights to red".
  - Vrondi 6y ago
    Gee, I have a super cheap plug in motion detector night light that does this function for less than $10.
- yosito 7y ago
  Every time I pick up my phone to check a piece of information or complete a simple task, I am presented with some other distraction that threatens to sidetrack me. When I don't want to be distracted, I often leave my phone in another room, turn it off, put it in a bag or even leave home without it. I've often thought of creating my own eink devices with focused purposes to help me get the information I need, while avoiding the distraction of a multipurpose device like a phone.
  - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago
    I would challenge the notion that the information is really needed.
  - derefr 7y ago
    > Every time I pick up my phone to check a piece of information or complete a simple task, I am presented with some other distraction that threatens to sidetrack me. Feels like a very good use of ML on the part of the mobile OS makers would be to decide, based on place and time and activity history, which of your active widgets should appear above the fold on the lockscreen of your phone. (E.g., when near a bus stop, next-bus times should appear. First thing in the morning after the phone has been inactive all night, the "summary of the calendar events for today" widget should appear. Weather should appear ~5 minutes before you usually leave the house, if-and-only-if there's something useful to know, e.g. rain predicted for today. Etc.) I know iOS has "Siri Suggestions", which is similar, but these are activity-history-corrleated tap-to-open links for apps, not specific actionable at-a-glance information. I think Google Glass tried to do this?
    - renewiltord 7y ago
      I'm pretty sure Android puts these in the soft notifications area with the right settings.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      I don't know that machine learning is the best approach for presenting contextually available information. If you just base it on usage patterns and have a problem with distractions, it's very easy to end up with "You're doing literally anything, do you want to open reddit/twitter/facebook?" But my iPhone does automatically pop up my grocery store membership card on the lock screen when I'm at the grocery store, and my boarding pass when I'm at the airport. I think that's currently done via Wallet and may not help with bus schedules, but a more curated approach does have some value.
franciscop 7y ago
I almost bought this eink yesterday to test it out, but as I'm seeing here and I thought, it seems a bit small. I am also considering getting a kindle and just putting a small html page on it so I don't have to get down to the pixel-level. I remember when I tried to use my now-defunct kindle that JS was giving some funny errors, probably should be treated as an old browser. Been holding out to see if a usb-c kindle comes up but people have been complaining for years now.
- eulers_secret 7y ago
  I did something like this on an old rooted kindle paperwhite. I wrote the script in bash, it uses a cross-compiled imagemagick to render an image, then pushes it to the screen using the 'eips' command. I still use it every day, it's my only living room clock now.
- ryanianian 7y ago
  The html browser on e-ink kindles is absurdly terrible (I think intentionally to discourage using the 'free' 3G for surfing). You may be able to get it to work, but godspeed. While not e-ink, I bought a handful of cheap used iPad-minis and mounted them on the wall. Serve them a little HTML UI from a raspberrypi in the closet. I tried a cheapo kindle fire, but it wasn't possible to get the browser to go "full-screen". I get the appeal of e-ink for a dashboard, but having fast-refresh, color, fast touch-response, a modern browser, and other things make for a much more pleasant UX (at the expense of being bright and having to worry about powering the thing).
  - ben174 7y ago
    To me, the appeal of e-ink is the fact it completely blends in with your room. There is no glow, no distraction when watching television. It's lit by your room. Also it doesn't feel "wasteful" to have it lit up when no one is in the room.
- nrp 7y ago
  Inkplate may be what you’re looking for, though it isn’t shipping yet: https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6 https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6
dmd 7y ago
I did something like this too. I definitely chose the wrong e-ink display, it was extremely awful to work with. https://github.com/dmd/wxpaper https://github.com/dmd/wxpaper
- nkozyra 7y ago
  Could you expound on the issues you ran into?
  - dmd 7y ago
    There's only one (very bad) font and no way to address pixels. So for everything I wanted to do I had to load bmps (in a bizarre format) into it. Each number is a bmp, for instance.
sambroner 7y ago
I'm loving this group of E-Ink projects. First the newspaper, then the resources for buying the best screen, now this. Thanks for sharing. Especially around the Image API. I think I'll have to take inspiration from (Copy!) parts of this project myself.
Drdrdrq 7y ago
Off-topic: after years of struggling with obsolete Python versions (like author here with 3.5) I have recently discovered pyenv. Never again will I be left without f-strings! Kudos and thank you to authors.
Jonnax 7y ago
I had the exact same idea a few months ago! Google home is such an uncustomisable waste of time. I ended up getting a 7.5 inch display from waveshare. What I want is to know when the trains from my nearby train station leaves. So I pulled the data off the UK National rail who have a free API. And got some weather from the openweathermap API. It updates every 5 minutes (well I turned it off since I'm not going anywhere these days haha) And it's a super simple python script that uses a simple image drawing library. Would recommend!
cmsj 7y ago
I have something similar that shows when the next bus is leaving our nearest stop. I really like it, and I would be tempted to invest in something larger for putting my calendar on the wall in my home office, but the big problem with this sort of thing is that cases are always a disaster. My bus Pi is in a really janky case because there was only really a couple that would fit with the ePaper display on it. If I could buy something about A4 size, in a sleek case that I could wall mount nicely, and have good hackability on, I would absolutely do it.
- diabeetusman 7y ago
  The Remarkable (an e-reader with a pen) is fairly hackable, but it's overkill for a dashboard.
  - ben174 7y ago
    Also very overpriced, imo. But it seems like e-ink displays are expensive in general.
- vb4 6y ago
  I used an IKEA picture frame for this purpose. It was relatively easy to fit one of the larger Waveshare screens inside, I only needed to cut a hole into the cardboard on the backside for the wires. A Pi Zero fits pretty nicely behind the cardboard piece that holds the screen in place, as the frame is rather thick. If you only glance at it, it looks like I framed a paper printout of my agenda.
- snovv_crash 6y ago
  Like this? https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6 https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6
DHPersonal 7y ago
I think this was what those little Chumby devices were attempting to do for people, but they've never seemed to be that popular. https://www.chumby.com/ https://www.chumby.com/
robocat 7y ago
An alternative might be to jailbreak a Kindle 2 or 3, looks like you just need a computer and a USB cable to do so. https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Python_on_Kindle https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Python_on_Kindle https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Hacks_Information https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Hacks_Information The original OS runs, so what you can do is limited. There are examples of changing the “screensaver” from Python, but I couldn’t see how easy it is to get data into the Kindle (maybe needs USB, which would make it kind of pointless.)
- dh-g 7y ago
  A paperwhite is a good option since you can use the RTC to enter deep sleep and run one of these off battery. I did it with a kindle 4 personally(but couldn't use RTC) and the code is available: https://github.com/davidhampgonsalves/life-dashboard https://github.com/davidhampgonsalves/life-dashboard
- userbinator 7y ago
  Kindle displays are themselves also not hard to drive directly, and relatively cheap: http://essentialscrap.com/eink/ http://essentialscrap.com/eink/ An interesting project someone did with one: https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar including pushing the display beyond its original (and currently commercial) limits of 16 levels of grayscale: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284
  - afranchuk 6y ago
    I absolutely encourage exploring and experimenting, but I wouldn't call the current state (even now) of driving those displays easy. I had a few such displays (and have a decent amount of experience with electronics and reverse engineering), but they differ in subtle ways, and since no comprehensive spec sheets are available you end up futzing around a lot to get it to work. I used that essentialscrap link as well as spritesmods (both excellent resources) and any other little tidbits I could find but it still took lots of iteration until I could even get anything displayed! Not to mention from a technical perspective, driving the displays takes 5 different voltages, 4 of which are fairly atypical. Still, they're really cool to mess around with, and cheap on eBay :)
crote 7y ago
This reminds me of "UpNext – an ePaper digital calendar for your desk"[1], which was posted on HN a month ago[2]. [1]: http://brettcvz.com/projects/6-upnext http://brettcvz.com/projects/6-upnext [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22628348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22628348
jandals 7y ago
It’s possible to get one of these e-ink display boards with an ESP32 microprocessor for not much more than the display alone. It has onboard WiFi and makes for an even smaller unit since there is no need to attach it to a Pi. It also ditches the operating system so you get an instant boot. Programming is via PlatformIO, MicroPython or Rust (if you’re adventurous! - Rust is not quite ready for ESP32). Has reignited my interest in coding after a hiatus, and there is something that feels special about these eink displays.
- photojosh 7y ago
  Not to mention really low power then, right? So you could have it wake up once every few minutes to refresh and a battery charge could last weeks.
  - jandals 7y ago
    Yes, for sure. I think the standard ESP32 + eink combo module consumes about 7.5ma in deep sleep. If you desolder the onboard power LED it will be much less - possibly 1ma.
- eximius 7y ago
  Source?
- glomph 7y ago
  Would it be possible to link to an example of what you mean?
  - mleonhard 6y ago
    https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6 https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    I've used one of the Lilygo Eink boards (this one I think: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32869729970.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32869729970.html). Their documentation (https://github.com/lewisxhe/TTGO-EPaper-Series https://github.com/lewisxhe/TTGO-EPaper-Series) is marginally better than most Aliexpress sellers (still not great, and blatantly wrong for some things like the width of the JST battery connector). There is a little driver funkiness with some of the boards and I've actually experienced something that looks similar to burn-in on mine, but the price is right and the form factor is great as long as the 2-3 inch screens are big enough for you.
agloeregrets 7y ago
This is one of those projects that would be wonderful if it were paired with a driver to be able to serve standard webpages on the display. Or just with a display driver for the whole pi and Chromium.
- napsy 6y ago
  This is exactly what the Visionect Place&Play does: can display HTML5 content on E-Ink displays (see https://www.visionect.com/products/place-and-play/ https://www.visionect.com/products/place-and-play/) and is packaged in a neat casing. Disclosure: I work for the company
p0llard 7y ago
The article mentions turning off the display to avoid ghosting and links to an article about screen burn in; it was my understanding that e-ink displays do not suffer burn in? I was under the impression that e-ink ghosting is simply due to an incomplete refresh of the display (since this causes a flash and is time consuming)? EDIT: Interestingly the datasheet for the component used does indeed mention this; does anyone have any insight here?
- reom_tobit 7y ago
  Due to the design of the screens (small capsules containing charged particles that move back and forth to create either black or white) the capsules can retain the charge that is passed through them if not cycled correctly. This will cause the particles within to stay in whatever side of the capsule they were last in, essentially causing a dead “pixel”. If this happens across as a whole image like a logo or text, it’ll permanently burn in. This is solved by some flashing between colours, hence why the screens take so long to refresh. Up for more detailed info myself though!
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    "Turning off" the screen seems like an invalid concept as the screen has no "off" state, white pixels are just as much off as black. Seems like all you need to do here is to just blink the screen every now and then. Even one blink cycle per day should be enough since ereaders usually go longer than that and are just fine.
    - reom_tobit 6y ago
      I believe the danger is not necessarily when you are leaving the capsule in one state or another for a long period of time, I believe it is more to do with a transition. So if you’re going from black -> black you need to cycle to white to ensure you don’t burn the black in. I’m not an expert though I’ve just faffed around with these displays myself a bit. The datasheets always err on the side of caution, I managed to get maybe 3fps out of mine, but that induced a lot of ghosting. I should try to get back to that project tbh.
MartijnBraam 7y ago
Hah I did a similar thing a few days ago using their 6" paper display. https://blog.brixit.nl/epaper/ https://blog.brixit.nl/epaper/ I chose to use the usb interface since had a server running to attach it to already
cuillevel3 7y ago
I'm still postponing coding my own dashboard. Until then I run PaperTTY in VNC mode to display HTML in chromium... Refresh is horrible on the 7.5in waveshare anyhow.
louwrentius 7y ago
Would it work on any wifi-enabled e-reader to just take the browser in full screen and point it at a custom web page (auto-refresh) and be done with this? Would it work?
samrolken 6y ago
The Nook Simple Touch is available used on eBay for $10-$20, and jailbreaks easily from the default shell to reveal a stripped down old version of Android, with browser and other pieces.
- edent 6y ago
  The browser is next to useless. It doesn't work with modern TLS and is pretty buggy. I used a custom Android app on my Nook build - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/02/turn-an-old-ereader-into-an-information-screen-nook-str/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/02/turn-an-old-ereader-into-an... - that's the only way I could get information to display on it.
s0l1dsnak3123 6y ago
I was looking into building something very similar right before I saw this post!
xixixao 6y ago
I strongly believe there is a market for a large, thin, slow-to-update e-ink display to hang on the wall, connect to your phone, and display stuff. I'd pay it for it, wouldn't you? I'm talking about an end-user product, not just a component for tinkering.
- gjs278 6y ago
  there isn’t. it doesn’t even look better than a normal monitor or phone
- zhoujianfu 6y ago
  Yep, I’ve been dreaming about this for years.. for me the critical component of it is no power cable.. just some (C?) batteries in the frame, and then it updates via infrared across the hall like grocery store eink price tags do. Bonus points if it’s color eink. Somebody please?
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I read a thing on HN the other day that was about being able to change an eink display off of wireless power (not sure if it was "ambient" energy like wifi signals or a directed thing like Qi); it's slow but apparently possible to incrementally change an e-ink screen like that. Could work with solar panels, and I'm sure that could be integrated into the screen.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  There's https://shopkits.eink.com/product/42%CB%9D-monochrome-epaper-display-ed420tt1/ https://shopkits.eink.com/product/42%CB%9D-monochrome-epaper..., a 42" monochrome display module, but it costs $2500 and it's a component, not a full solution. But, it could be made into a product, the components are all present. It'd likely retail at an easy $5000 - $10000 though, and I don't know if that is competitive with e.g. the Surface Hub (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/business/surface-hub-2); https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/business/surface-hub... only found one price for it but it's $10K, but you get a full computer, high resolution color touch screen, etc.
- 6y ago
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
How about just buying an e-ink reader (there is a 13inch one that also btw works as an HDMI screen) that has a browser, and just point it to self-updating webpage?
IshKebab 6y ago
This is probably an easier option: https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6 https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6

290 points by nromiun 7y ago

That's cool! I built something similar for our boat with a black and white e-ink screen https://github.com/meri-imperiumi/dashboard https://github.com/meri-imperiumi/dashboard

amelius 7y ago

> I realized I was asking Google Assistant the same questions over and over again. Like What’s the current weather? or What’s on my calendar for today? So I set out to build a small dashboard for my Raspberry Pi that I could check instead. Why not use a widget on the home-screen of your phone?

saagarjha 7y ago
Not everyone's phone can do that :(
gchamonlive 7y ago
Phones are multi purpose. You do a lot with it and having every piece of information crammed into layers of applications is not the best design. Some pieces of information, specially those regarding productivity like calendar or a kanban board are better delegated to solutions designed just for that. A whiteboard, a dedicated LCD screen, an eink dashboard controlled by a raspberry pi... Take your pick, as long as it is always visible.
- DelightOne 7y ago
  I have the hope that AR fixes this with new glasses and arranging virtual dashboards around the house. The AR technology is already there, only the glasses are missing.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I.e. AR technology is already there, only AR technology is missing ;). Rendering things is a solved problem. SLAM, arguably, too. But the whole idea of AR is to render synthetic images on top of the view of the real world, and sadly, that still feels very far away. That said, maybe the AR-in-VR will be a good enough stopgap? Turns out, looking at the world through cameras isn't all that bad. I bought Oculus Quest the other day, which uses an array of cameras for SLAM (it's an untethered headset, meaning you can walk around the house with it), and can feed that camera data to you. Originally envisioned as a safety measure (if you leave your defined play area, the VR view transitions to camera pass-through), it's surprisingly good as a way to look at the world in general. Despite being monochrome and low resolution. If somebody can make a Quest-like headset with higher resolution screens and higher resolution, full-color cameras, this would be already halfway-usable AR.
jayd16 7y ago
He made a Google Home Hub but still...its a fun project.
Cerium 7y ago
I ask Google Assistant the weather every night just to get it to turn on the little LEDs. They light up the room enough to see where I am walking.
- renewiltord 7y ago
  With smart lights and the assistant, I actually do this as "Hey Google, lights to red".
- Vrondi 6y ago
  Gee, I have a super cheap plug in motion detector night light that does this function for less than $10.
yosito 7y ago
Every time I pick up my phone to check a piece of information or complete a simple task, I am presented with some other distraction that threatens to sidetrack me. When I don't want to be distracted, I often leave my phone in another room, turn it off, put it in a bag or even leave home without it. I've often thought of creating my own eink devices with focused purposes to help me get the information I need, while avoiding the distraction of a multipurpose device like a phone.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago
  I would challenge the notion that the information is really needed.
- derefr 7y ago
  > Every time I pick up my phone to check a piece of information or complete a simple task, I am presented with some other distraction that threatens to sidetrack me. Feels like a very good use of ML on the part of the mobile OS makers would be to decide, based on place and time and activity history, which of your active widgets should appear above the fold on the lockscreen of your phone. (E.g., when near a bus stop, next-bus times should appear. First thing in the morning after the phone has been inactive all night, the "summary of the calendar events for today" widget should appear. Weather should appear ~5 minutes before you usually leave the house, if-and-only-if there's something useful to know, e.g. rain predicted for today. Etc.) I know iOS has "Siri Suggestions", which is similar, but these are activity-history-corrleated tap-to-open links for apps, not specific actionable at-a-glance information. I think Google Glass tried to do this?
  - renewiltord 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure Android puts these in the soft notifications area with the right settings.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    I don't know that machine learning is the best approach for presenting contextually available information. If you just base it on usage patterns and have a problem with distractions, it's very easy to end up with "You're doing literally anything, do you want to open reddit/twitter/facebook?" But my iPhone does automatically pop up my grocery store membership card on the lock screen when I'm at the grocery store, and my boarding pass when I'm at the airport. I think that's currently done via Wallet and may not help with bus schedules, but a more curated approach does have some value.

franciscop 7y ago

I almost bought this eink yesterday to test it out, but as I'm seeing here and I thought, it seems a bit small. I am also considering getting a kindle and just putting a small html page on it so I don't have to get down to the pixel-level. I remember when I tried to use my now-defunct kindle that JS was giving some funny errors, probably should be treated as an old browser. Been holding out to see if a usb-c kindle comes up but people have been complaining for years now.

eulers_secret 7y ago
I did something like this on an old rooted kindle paperwhite. I wrote the script in bash, it uses a cross-compiled imagemagick to render an image, then pushes it to the screen using the 'eips' command. I still use it every day, it's my only living room clock now.
ryanianian 7y ago
The html browser on e-ink kindles is absurdly terrible (I think intentionally to discourage using the 'free' 3G for surfing). You may be able to get it to work, but godspeed. While not e-ink, I bought a handful of cheap used iPad-minis and mounted them on the wall. Serve them a little HTML UI from a raspberrypi in the closet. I tried a cheapo kindle fire, but it wasn't possible to get the browser to go "full-screen". I get the appeal of e-ink for a dashboard, but having fast-refresh, color, fast touch-response, a modern browser, and other things make for a much more pleasant UX (at the expense of being bright and having to worry about powering the thing).
- ben174 7y ago
  To me, the appeal of e-ink is the fact it completely blends in with your room. There is no glow, no distraction when watching television. It's lit by your room. Also it doesn't feel "wasteful" to have it lit up when no one is in the room.
nrp 7y ago
Inkplate may be what you’re looking for, though it isn’t shipping yet: https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6 https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6

dmd 7y ago

I did something like this too. I definitely chose the wrong e-ink display, it was extremely awful to work with. https://github.com/dmd/wxpaper https://github.com/dmd/wxpaper

nkozyra 7y ago
Could you expound on the issues you ran into?
- dmd 7y ago
  There's only one (very bad) font and no way to address pixels. So for everything I wanted to do I had to load bmps (in a bizarre format) into it. Each number is a bmp, for instance.

sambroner 7y ago

I'm loving this group of E-Ink projects. First the newspaper, then the resources for buying the best screen, now this. Thanks for sharing. Especially around the Image API. I think I'll have to take inspiration from (Copy!) parts of this project myself.

Drdrdrq 7y ago

Off-topic: after years of struggling with obsolete Python versions (like author here with 3.5) I have recently discovered pyenv. Never again will I be left without f-strings! Kudos and thank you to authors.

Jonnax 7y ago

I had the exact same idea a few months ago! Google home is such an uncustomisable waste of time. I ended up getting a 7.5 inch display from waveshare. What I want is to know when the trains from my nearby train station leaves. So I pulled the data off the UK National rail who have a free API. And got some weather from the openweathermap API. It updates every 5 minutes (well I turned it off since I'm not going anywhere these days haha) And it's a super simple python script that uses a simple image drawing library. Would recommend!

cmsj 7y ago

I have something similar that shows when the next bus is leaving our nearest stop. I really like it, and I would be tempted to invest in something larger for putting my calendar on the wall in my home office, but the big problem with this sort of thing is that cases are always a disaster. My bus Pi is in a really janky case because there was only really a couple that would fit with the ePaper display on it. If I could buy something about A4 size, in a sleek case that I could wall mount nicely, and have good hackability on, I would absolutely do it.

diabeetusman 7y ago
The Remarkable (an e-reader with a pen) is fairly hackable, but it's overkill for a dashboard.
- ben174 7y ago
  Also very overpriced, imo. But it seems like e-ink displays are expensive in general.
vb4 6y ago
I used an IKEA picture frame for this purpose. It was relatively easy to fit one of the larger Waveshare screens inside, I only needed to cut a hole into the cardboard on the backside for the wires. A Pi Zero fits pretty nicely behind the cardboard piece that holds the screen in place, as the frame is rather thick. If you only glance at it, it looks like I framed a paper printout of my agenda.
snovv_crash 6y ago
Like this? https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6 https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6

DHPersonal 7y ago

I think this was what those little Chumby devices were attempting to do for people, but they've never seemed to be that popular. https://www.chumby.com/ https://www.chumby.com/

robocat 7y ago

An alternative might be to jailbreak a Kindle 2 or 3, looks like you just need a computer and a USB cable to do so. https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Python_on_Kindle https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Python_on_Kindle https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Hacks_Information https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Hacks_Information The original OS runs, so what you can do is limited. There are examples of changing the “screensaver” from Python, but I couldn’t see how easy it is to get data into the Kindle (maybe needs USB, which would make it kind of pointless.)

dh-g 7y ago
A paperwhite is a good option since you can use the RTC to enter deep sleep and run one of these off battery. I did it with a kindle 4 personally(but couldn't use RTC) and the code is available: https://github.com/davidhampgonsalves/life-dashboard https://github.com/davidhampgonsalves/life-dashboard
userbinator 7y ago
Kindle displays are themselves also not hard to drive directly, and relatively cheap: http://essentialscrap.com/eink/ http://essentialscrap.com/eink/ An interesting project someone did with one: https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar including pushing the display beyond its original (and currently commercial) limits of 16 levels of grayscale: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284
- afranchuk 6y ago
  I absolutely encourage exploring and experimenting, but I wouldn't call the current state (even now) of driving those displays easy. I had a few such displays (and have a decent amount of experience with electronics and reverse engineering), but they differ in subtle ways, and since no comprehensive spec sheets are available you end up futzing around a lot to get it to work. I used that essentialscrap link as well as spritesmods (both excellent resources) and any other little tidbits I could find but it still took lots of iteration until I could even get anything displayed! Not to mention from a technical perspective, driving the displays takes 5 different voltages, 4 of which are fairly atypical. Still, they're really cool to mess around with, and cheap on eBay :)

crote 7y ago

This reminds me of "UpNext – an ePaper digital calendar for your desk"[1], which was posted on HN a month ago[2]. [1]: http://brettcvz.com/projects/6-upnext http://brettcvz.com/projects/6-upnext [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22628348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22628348

jandals 7y ago

It’s possible to get one of these e-ink display boards with an ESP32 microprocessor for not much more than the display alone. It has onboard WiFi and makes for an even smaller unit since there is no need to attach it to a Pi. It also ditches the operating system so you get an instant boot. Programming is via PlatformIO, MicroPython or Rust (if you’re adventurous! - Rust is not quite ready for ESP32). Has reignited my interest in coding after a hiatus, and there is something that feels special about these eink displays.

photojosh 7y ago
Not to mention really low power then, right? So you could have it wake up once every few minutes to refresh and a battery charge could last weeks.
- jandals 7y ago
  Yes, for sure. I think the standard ESP32 + eink combo module consumes about 7.5ma in deep sleep. If you desolder the onboard power LED it will be much less - possibly 1ma.
eximius 7y ago
Source?
glomph 7y ago
Would it be possible to link to an example of what you mean?
- mleonhard 6y ago
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6 https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  I've used one of the Lilygo Eink boards (this one I think: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32869729970.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32869729970.html). Their documentation (https://github.com/lewisxhe/TTGO-EPaper-Series https://github.com/lewisxhe/TTGO-EPaper-Series) is marginally better than most Aliexpress sellers (still not great, and blatantly wrong for some things like the width of the JST battery connector). There is a little driver funkiness with some of the boards and I've actually experienced something that looks similar to burn-in on mine, but the price is right and the form factor is great as long as the 2-3 inch screens are big enough for you.

agloeregrets 7y ago

This is one of those projects that would be wonderful if it were paired with a driver to be able to serve standard webpages on the display. Or just with a display driver for the whole pi and Chromium.

napsy 6y ago
This is exactly what the Visionect Place&Play does: can display HTML5 content on E-Ink displays (see https://www.visionect.com/products/place-and-play/ https://www.visionect.com/products/place-and-play/) and is packaged in a neat casing. Disclosure: I work for the company

p0llard 7y ago

The article mentions turning off the display to avoid ghosting and links to an article about screen burn in; it was my understanding that e-ink displays do not suffer burn in? I was under the impression that e-ink ghosting is simply due to an incomplete refresh of the display (since this causes a flash and is time consuming)? EDIT: Interestingly the datasheet for the component used does indeed mention this; does anyone have any insight here?

reom_tobit 7y ago
Due to the design of the screens (small capsules containing charged particles that move back and forth to create either black or white) the capsules can retain the charge that is passed through them if not cycled correctly. This will cause the particles within to stay in whatever side of the capsule they were last in, essentially causing a dead “pixel”. If this happens across as a whole image like a logo or text, it’ll permanently burn in. This is solved by some flashing between colours, hence why the screens take so long to refresh. Up for more detailed info myself though!
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  "Turning off" the screen seems like an invalid concept as the screen has no "off" state, white pixels are just as much off as black. Seems like all you need to do here is to just blink the screen every now and then. Even one blink cycle per day should be enough since ereaders usually go longer than that and are just fine.
  - reom_tobit 6y ago
    I believe the danger is not necessarily when you are leaving the capsule in one state or another for a long period of time, I believe it is more to do with a transition. So if you’re going from black -> black you need to cycle to white to ensure you don’t burn the black in. I’m not an expert though I’ve just faffed around with these displays myself a bit. The datasheets always err on the side of caution, I managed to get maybe 3fps out of mine, but that induced a lot of ghosting. I should try to get back to that project tbh.

MartijnBraam 7y ago

Hah I did a similar thing a few days ago using their 6" paper display. https://blog.brixit.nl/epaper/ https://blog.brixit.nl/epaper/ I chose to use the usb interface since had a server running to attach it to already

cuillevel3 7y ago

I'm still postponing coding my own dashboard. Until then I run PaperTTY in VNC mode to display HTML in chromium... Refresh is horrible on the 7.5in waveshare anyhow.

louwrentius 7y ago

Would it work on any wifi-enabled e-reader to just take the browser in full screen and point it at a custom web page (auto-refresh) and be done with this? Would it work?

samrolken 6y ago

The Nook Simple Touch is available used on eBay for $10-$20, and jailbreaks easily from the default shell to reveal a stripped down old version of Android, with browser and other pieces.

edent 6y ago
The browser is next to useless. It doesn't work with modern TLS and is pretty buggy. I used a custom Android app on my Nook build - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/02/turn-an-old-ereader-into-an-information-screen-nook-str/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/02/turn-an-old-ereader-into-an... - that's the only way I could get information to display on it.

s0l1dsnak3123 6y ago

I was looking into building something very similar right before I saw this post!

xixixao 6y ago

I strongly believe there is a market for a large, thin, slow-to-update e-ink display to hang on the wall, connect to your phone, and display stuff. I'd pay it for it, wouldn't you? I'm talking about an end-user product, not just a component for tinkering.

gjs278 6y ago
there isn’t. it doesn’t even look better than a normal monitor or phone
zhoujianfu 6y ago
Yep, I’ve been dreaming about this for years.. for me the critical component of it is no power cable.. just some (C?) batteries in the frame, and then it updates via infrared across the hall like grocery store eink price tags do. Bonus points if it’s color eink. Somebody please?
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I read a thing on HN the other day that was about being able to change an eink display off of wireless power (not sure if it was "ambient" energy like wifi signals or a directed thing like Qi); it's slow but apparently possible to incrementally change an e-ink screen like that. Could work with solar panels, and I'm sure that could be integrated into the screen.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
There's https://shopkits.eink.com/product/42%CB%9D-monochrome-epaper-display-ed420tt1/ https://shopkits.eink.com/product/42%CB%9D-monochrome-epaper..., a 42" monochrome display module, but it costs $2500 and it's a component, not a full solution. But, it could be made into a product, the components are all present. It'd likely retail at an easy $5000 - $10000 though, and I don't know if that is competitive with e.g. the Surface Hub (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/business/surface-hub-2); https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/business/surface-hub... only found one price for it but it's $10K, but you get a full computer, high resolution color touch screen, etc.
6y ago

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

How about just buying an e-ink reader (there is a 13inch one that also btw works as an HDMI screen) that has a browser, and just point it to self-updating webpage?

IshKebab 6y ago

This is probably an easier option: https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6 https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6