I posted a few days back that I was putting together one of these, very similar to the one described in that story. The e-ink screen I was waiting for (this on

I posted a few days back that I was putting together one of these, very similar to the one described in that story. The e-ink screen I was waiting for (this one: https://www.waveshare.com/6inch-e-paper-hat.htm https://www.waveshare.com/6inch-e-paper-hat.htm) arrived literally days after I posted that comment, about a month earlier than expected, and I now mostly have an initial version of the project working. Some comments: A nice 6” screen for $70ish is a pretty great deal, although I’ll confess that I’m thinking about upgrading to their similar 9.7” screen, which is about double the price. A full frame update takes about half a second (but the whole screen does flash white during it, so it definitely draws the eye if you have it anywhere in your eyeline when the frame update happens. In theory the display supports partial updates, but I’m not sure it supports them in greyscale display modes; I haven’t investigated that yet) One gotcha which I hadn’t planned for is that even when fully blank, the display isn’t really white. I’d say that it’s maybe a 30% grey, so the movie frame can often appear to just be a big black rectangle, unless the room lighting is really good. And if you’re framing the display with a white mat around it (as I did), then that’s just going to make it look even darker again. I think I’m going to have to cut a new mat from a darker material. And in the meantime, I’m boosting brightness and contrast of each extracted frame before converting to greyscale, and that’s helped a lot. (In the medium story, Bryan is using a 3D printed frame in black without a mat, which strongly mitigates the contrast issue) Another gotcha I ran into is that the frame I bought to put the project in (an Ikea Hovsta) turns out not to be deep enough to house a pi + the hat which controls it, so I’m probably going to need to buy a deeper frame (right now I have the pi hanging out the back while the frame sits on my desk). You might be able to squeeze everything into the frame if you used a RPi Zero and wired the connections individually, instead of connecting via the HAT.. but I’m not sure whether an RPi Zero will be able to keep up with decoding a HD video stream and dithering and displaying frames even at a 2.5 minutes/frame speed. (I haven’t tested at all; it might be totally fine!)