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E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
- acidburnNSA 5y agoHeh that's cool. It renders the calendar as HTML and then uses selenium to open up headless chrome and screenshot it and then send the bitmap to the eink display. Clever.
- freeone3000 5y agothere has to be a simpler way to draw a grid. there has to.
- adrianmonk 5y agoPostScript, maybe. Instead of generating HTML from calendar data, generate PS and have Ghostscript convert it to PNG. I don't know PostScript, and based on the example code in the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#The_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#The_language), I was able to get it to draw some text in a few minutes.
- 41209 5y agoAll the complexity is handled by well known tools/libraries. I can code a selenium script to capture a screenshot in my sleep. Often using tools your know is the best solution. Your free to fork this and come up with a cleaner implementation. This is probably why you need a PI Zero. Smaller micro controllers can't run a full browser. Most of these projects are just whatever can be hacked together in a weekend.
- floren 5y agoWhen all you have is a hammer...
- vanviegen 5y agoSure. But this approach sounds like a sensible base to quickly whip up all sorts of little projects.
- pshc 5y agoI would volunteer LaTeX but that's also 100s of MBs/GBs of dependencies to be fair. Perhaps an SVG rasterizer would suffice here.
- dragonwriter 5y agoSimpler in runtime overhead. Simpler for a developer familiar with the tools used here, but less so with others? Maybe not. This seems to be a hobbyist project, not a major corporate effort where $100Ks were spent on tech selection.
- saagarjha 5y agoI would not be surprised if a corporation would spend $100Ks on tech selection and end up with a headless Chrome too.
- salawat 5y agoThat is not clever. That is horrifying. You have just massively bloated your set of dependencies to accomplish something you could have done with a rudimentary GUI toolkit.
- rfrankenstein 5y ago“Premature optimization is the root of all evil”—Donald Knuth.
- emsy 5y agoThat phrase is so overused in light of massively over engineered solutions that are created every day in our industry . Let’s face it: this project loads some data via http and displays some text and primitives on a display. This can easily be handled on a esp32 with room to spare. But somehow we think it’s normal to involve an OS, a fully fledged computer and a browser to do this. Seriously, we need the opposite of the Knuth quote: “When in doubt don’t ship a browser” or something like that.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoI wonder what the reason is for this solution. He must have one.
- edoceo 5y agoCause EInk display code works nice to just ship it an image type file. So, it's gotta be rasterized before, using Chromium makes that super easy - rather than hand crafting PNG. I personally make SVG then rasterize but this isn't that terrible.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoI was going down this route once, trying to use Inkscape headless. Is there a SVG-2-bitmap tool you can recommend?
- 5y ago
- tejohnso 5y agoI use Python Imaging Library + Seaborn to push out a bar chart bitmap representing some PiHole statistics to this: https://thepihut.com/products/inky-impression-7-colour-epaper-eink-epd https://thepihut.com/products/inky-impression-7-colour-epape...
- acidburnNSA 5y agoAh nice. Yeah I'm looking for the right display for my skymap that shows the sun and moon and planets as they track across the sky. It's fun to see the sun curve change with the seasons. Would be way better to have on 7 color eink in the living room than on my phone or laptop. This one looks good. Are there any that are like 3 inches bigger with borderline similar price points?
- killjoywashere 5y agoYou know what would be cool? An e-Ink glassboard. You need a graph grid? Check. Need a smaller grid? No problem. Stylish picture, sure.
- dmclamb 5y agoWhy not use a raspberry pi connected to an hdtv to display this, weather, news, etc.? You could make one HDMI port the "what's happening" channel. Plus run pinhole.
- blackoil 5y agoThis looks like a desk calendar. e-ink is low power, allowing you to build a portable unit running on battery. And it has it own distinctive look, which some may prefer. Though yeah, an hdtv version would be lot functional.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoIt seems some of us are more averse to LCD screens than others. For an always-on ambient advice, I appreciate that epaper can match the lighting of the room and not draw attention to itself (instead of basically being a flourescent bulb)
- crzysdrs 5y agoI wrote a similar project that generates Gameboy art from a collection of roms on a Raspberry pi and displayed them on a 8 color E-Ink display. https://github.com/crzysdrs/slate https://github.com/crzysdrs/slate
- teddyh 5y ago• Displays one month • Needs battery change more than monthly I.e. it’s still less work to have a paper calendar and flip a page every month.
- trog 5y ago> I.e. it’s still less work to have a paper calendar and flip a page every month. Is there a plugin for paper calendar so it will automatically sync with my Google Calendar?!
- headmelted 5y agoWell, I mean, it also syncs automatically with google - which is kind of the whole point.
- 9935c101ab17a66 5y agoDo you feel this comment has contributed anything to discussion around this post?
- teddyh 5y agoYes. The continual obliviousness which product makers (and buyers) have towards battery life is very annoying. I used to have a wristwatch which was the most technically advanced watch I could find, and it had a touch screen and various applications. Its battery consistently lasted for more than two years after each battery change. Eventually the touch screen wore out, and I stopped using it. I can’t stand all this modern hardware which must all be charged after a few hours of use. It’s a continual stress factor to keep track of the charge of all your various devices.
- foolfoolz 5y agoi’ve thought about this a lot because i use a whiteboard on my fridge. i would do this if it was huge like my whiteboard. like 2ft by 3ft. then i can read each day at a glance. seeing the whole month is huge. and writing on it means it should be a touch screen i find myself wanting larger displays than is for sale a lot. i want an electric photo frame but not some 12in screen. i have great photos i want to see them 4ft tall. this is an underserved market
- opencl 5y agoThere are 31" and 42" e-ink displays available, but they cost a few thousand dollars. The 42" is pretty close to 2ft by 3ft, 25" x 33".
- JonathanFly 5y ago>There are 31" and 42" e-ink displays available, but they cost a few thousand dollars. The 42" is pretty close to 2ft by 3ft, 25" x 33". I must have 4 or 5 old Kindles in a drawer by now, somehow. I wonder if you could hack together a grid of old Kindles to make a giant e-ink screen?
- pfranz 5y agoA lot of these kinds of projects render out an image and send that to the display. If you did it on a server, cut up the images, and had each kindle pull their image it should be pretty trivial. The only immediate issue that comes to mind is making sure they're relatively in sync when pulling a new image if you're worried about polling too often.
- tough 5y agoWith 5 kindles you get a monday to friday one for each day for starters
- gedy 5y agoMight be cheaper to put a printer on top of your fridge and automatically print calendar every morning into a plexiglass holder :-)
- tomcam 5y agoThis write-up itself appears to be of amazingly high-quality. What an incredible thing to give away to the world.
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y agoCan’t explain why but all these E-Ink projects are so awesome and attractive to me. I’m surprised I can’t just buy a bunch of E-Ink style gizmos from some company to decorate my home and office. My wallet would be wide open to it constantly. Great work and congrats on this!
- ytdytvhxgydvhh 5y agoAgreed. I’m surprised the NYT won’t sell me an official version of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25063726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25063726
- w3p706 5y agoI buy old kindles for this, ~50$ per piece. they have a linux os & battery included. you get in through a serial port and a password generated for your serial number. downside is that you fight the kindle os in certain aspects. see for example: https://github.com/Neelakurinji123/kindle-weather-display https://github.com/Neelakurinji123/kindle-weather-display
- bpye 5y agoI wonder what it would take to build your own firmware image if you were reusing for exclusive alternative use? Presumably there is a Linux kernel tree somewhere and you could pull the waveforms from the Amazon image?
- nanomonkey 5y agoCheck out http://fread.ink/ http://fread.ink/
- karlkloss 5y agoDo you have a list of compatible kindle models, and how to identify them?
- w3p706 5y ago
- kokey 5y agoI'm delighted to see the e-ink displays prices coming down, even though it's coming down a bit slowly.
- DantesKite 5y agoImagine wallpaper sized e-ink displays. would make for some amazing, decorative art.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoNice, but I can't think of less power-efficient embedded platform than an RPi. Especially with something as low power as E-Ink (zero power when displaying). 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).
- mwcampbell 5y agoHow does ESP32 compare to the products you listed?
- dheera 5y agoI find the ESP32 much easier to develop for, you don't need to install any toolchains, just plug in and drop code into the virtual USB drive that shows up! I wish all microcontrollers were like that these days.
- BoorishBears 5y agoThat sounds like a very specific bootloader that you're using 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
- dheera 5y agoOh sure, but it's still way better than the last time I had to deal with an STM32 and install about 5 different things, modify a "boards.txt" file (which there were 3 copies of on my system in different places and I had no idea which was the real one) and then hit the program button with one hand with a mouse in the air while carefully timing a short of a reset trace on a PCB with the other with my elbow holding down the PCB. STM32s really suck. Never had to do that with an ESP32, at least someone made a nice bootloader for it.
- ed25519FUUU 5y agoThe first thing I always do with these E-Ink projects is to check the price of the display, to see if it's come down at all since the last time I checked over the last 3+ years: > Waveshare 12.48" Tri-color E-Ink Display - $179.99 NOPE
- busymom0 5y agoI would love to build something like this but the price of these screens is insane :(
- reilly3000 5y agoIs e-ink fundamentally more expensive to produce, or is the quantity produced just not enough right now?
- emsy 5y agoI remember reading somewhere on HN that it‘s a patent/monopoly issue but I didn‘t verify.
- stroz 5y agoSuper cool concept, thanks for sharing!
- vesuvianvenus 5y agoNice project & explanation. I can see myself expanding on this (maybe even re-hashing your library essentially) running: 1. a Calendar, 2. next to a Stock Ticker, 3. next to a Financial accounts (i.e. all current asset) combined with Financial goals. I've been thinking about the third one for a while. E-Ink / a simple, low power, monochromatic screen (similar to Amazon Kindle eReader) would be a good choice.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoI’m not 100% sure how well it would work, but pointing an old kindle at a auto-refreshing web page might get the job done.
- xvector 5y agoIIRC someone on HN once mentioned that the Kindle web browser has a memory leak that will cause an OoM error/crash every (1000?) refreshes. They had a workaround but I forgot what it was.
- nathan_f77 5y agoThis is awesome! I'd love to build one. But I would probably like to have it plugged in, so I could update it more regularly with Spotify and some info from Home Assistant. The only problem is that I can't find Raspberry Pi Zeros anywhere. I tried ordering one yesterday to make a little Spotify Now Playing screen, and they're out of stock everywhere I looked.
- password4321 5y agoI'm planning on setting up an all-in-one touchscreen+computer+monitor ($300 on eBay) as a glorified family to-do list manager and photo frame... any software recommendations would be appreciated! (For instance, not sure how well supported the touch screens are on Linux, etc.)
- afs27 5y agoIs anyone making E-Ink displays for NFTs?
- GauntletWizard 5y agoWhen I was at Google I worked with the developers of the Radish project [1], which was installed all over at the time. It's amazing how far the state of the art has some since then. Aaron told me about the memory constraints - The Radish streamed data to the e-ink display's memory buffer to update, powering it on to do so only briefly, while a Pi Zero is plenty enough to render the whole display. We've come a very long way. [1] https://developers.google.com/gdata/articles/radish https://developers.google.com/gdata/articles/radish
- ChuckMcM 5y agoSeems like an ideal use for a large e-ink display, useful reference information that doesn't change often. Cool.
- iota7 5y agoThe e-ink displays are a bit costly. Otherwise I would get a few of them and would replace all the paper calendars at home. Simply a calendar, no internet, low power. Not raspberry PI based, some low powered microcontroller simply displaying a paper like calendar and nothing fancy.
- konschubert 5y agoHey man, this is so cool. I hope it’s okay to plug here: I am working towards releasing a similar product for sale: https://www.invisible-computers.com/ https://www.invisible-computers.com/ Unfortunately the display isn’t as big as the one you chose and it isn’t battery powered. But I am starting to ship the first units, so there is that :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chubs 5y agoLooks fantastic, good luck with it :)
- IshKebab 5y agoThat's cool. Why not battery powered though? That seems like one of the biggest benefits of e-ink and also a wire coming out of your calendar seems like a pretty huge drawback. Love the wood bezel though; looks really nice.
- konschubert 5y agoIf I make it battery powered it needs to run on a charge for a few months, otherwise it becomes a hassle. And then, it must be possible to charge it easily. Also, space. Right now the calendar is 7mm think and I think it won’t look as nice on the wall if I make it much thicker. There are a lot of edge cases to consider. It’s definitely on my wish list but I cut it out for simplicity, for now.
- WithinReason 5y agoCompletely off topic, but you could have followed "Breakfast at Tiffany's" with "Dinner with Andre"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Dinner_with_Andre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Dinner_with_Andre
- drited 5y agoYou weren't lying about being completely off topic.
- clash 5y agoThis calender-thing really seems to resonate with people! I built something similar but more versatile, where you can either display images or feed the display with whatever information you want remotely. And it runs on a battery for a whole year: https://framelabs.eu/en/ https://framelabs.eu/en/
- sincarne 5y agoThis morning when I awoke, my wife had propped up her ebook reader on the nightstand next to me. It looked nice. I thought: how cool would it be to have a little e-ink display to which I could beam a few key pieces of information? Beautiful project!
- Animats 5y agoThe main problem with e-ink is finding a display that doesn't cost 5x what an LCD of the same size would cost. This display was $179 before it became unavailable. That's on the low end for such displays bigger than phone-sized. If the e-ink people ever overcome their cost problem, we'll see many more products.
- ghoomketu 5y agoJust curious but is it the lack of mass production or something sinister like patents / monopoly?
- Maxion 5y agoPatents & monopoly
- rcarmo 5y agoWell, to be fair, large displays tend to be fragile and unwieldy as well. Depends a lot on manufacturer, but in essence short production runs also don’t help lower the price.
- spuz 5y agoApparently, this is not true according to an HN user robinsoh who works in the industry. Check his comment history more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=robinsoh https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=robinsoh
- eli 5y agoI asked someone from Visionect (eInk maker) what was driving the price for large panels and they said the same thing: just not enough volume yet.
- taf2 5y agoAt least this [1] article seems to indicate the presence of patents [1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171220005895/en/E-Ink-Successfully-Defends-Patent-Infringement-Case https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171220005895/en/E-I...
- paulcarroty 5y agoGreat idea. Will be great to have hackable audio player with big battery 'cause it's hard quest to find one with good audiobooks & folders support.
- GTP 5y agoLooks great, IMO you could bring down battery usage by using an ESP8266/ESP32 instead of a Raspberry PI
- sysihyk 5y agoI think Pi Nano will be seriously underworking in this setup.
- mvkel 5y agoThis is a beautiful piece! We need a better design than the 30-box view. How useful is it to see “Appoi…” on a Thursday?