[HN Gopher] E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered...
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E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
Author : edward
Score : 123 points
Date : 2021-10-03 20:59 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| tomcam wrote:
| This write-up itself appears to be of amazingly high-quality.
| What an incredible thing to give away to the world.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Can'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!
| jaidan wrote:
| I'm sorry to have to let you know your wallet may empty if you
| have not seen this already:
|
| [edit: 4.7" ESP32 based epaper display with touchscreen, built
| in battery and expansion ports]
|
| https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-...
| azeirah wrote:
| I scoured the wave share site for all the other e-ink screens
| and there're many cheaper ones.
|
| 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$
|
| 800x480, 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$!
| remir wrote:
| These projects have a pleasant "lo-fi zen" aspect that makes
| them attractive, I think. They are simple, provide value yet
| fade into the background without sucking your attention like
| some other gadgets.
| oingodoingo wrote:
| For me it's a cost issue, this is over $200... I _might_ pay
| $100 for it, but this wouldn't be a must-buy for me until it
| hits ~$50
| politelemon wrote:
| I've been using another eink project dashboard, which cost me
| less as the screen is a smaller one, but it doesn't have
| colour: https://github.com/mendhak/waveshare-epaper-display
| ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote:
| Agreed. I'm surprised the NYT won't sell me an official version
| of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25063726
| x0x0 wrote:
| Here's one for $125 that I'd been planning on buying.
|
| https://e-radionica.com/en/inkplate-29.html
|
| The project, found on hn:
| https://rahulrav.com/blog/e_ink_dashboard.html
| axegon_ wrote:
| They are neat. It's not as much in your face as a normal
| display plus they require almost no power so you can do awesome
| things with a SBC or an Arduino, smb32 or something else if you
| really want to make something completely off the grid. The
| Denali is that eink displays are still insanely expensive
| compared to any other screen.
| kokey wrote:
| I'm delighted to see the e-ink displays prices coming down, even
| though it's coming down a bit slowly.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| The 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
| dmclamb wrote:
| Why 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.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I would love to build something like this but the price of these
| screens is insane :(
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Nice, 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).
| miohtama wrote:
| Can you keep RPi most of the time hibernated? Does it still
| draw a lot of power in sleep?
| colonelxc wrote:
| This very article shows how they use another product that
| just turns on the pi on a schedule (once a day) to render the
| updated calendar.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I don't think it has a hibernate mode, but it has been a
| quite a hwile since I've downloaded the latest headless
| server build.
|
| 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.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Sure, there are more power efficient platforms, but the project
| uses Selenium and PIL which I'm pretty sure won't run on any of
| those boards.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I was going to say, I feel like an ESP32 might be a better fit
| for this.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| How does ESP32 compare to the products you listed?
| dheera wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| That 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
| fcsp wrote:
| How do you handle SSL? I found this very cumbersome in my
| experiments with esp32
| stavros wrote:
| It depends on whether you want to connect to random hosts
| or ones that you know beforehand. The latter is very
| easy, I just hardcode the certificate fingerprint. The
| former/dealing with CAs is harder, I've never done it.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I never coded on Espressif, but in other SDKs (e.g.,
| mosquitto, mbedtls) typically this is done when you open
| the connection at the application layer (HTTPS, MQTTS).
| You pass in the cert bytes either as binary or PEM text
| as a char[]. Use a CA root cert(s) from your OS/browser.
|
| EDIT: grammar and typos.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I wanted to try their Espressif ESP32 low power 802.11 part
| back in March but it wasn't shipping yet. Their website isn't
| clear but I'll poke around and see if it has been released
| yet.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Heh 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 wrote:
| there has to be a simpler way to draw a grid. there has to.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Sure. But this approach sounds like a sensible base to
| quickly whip up all sorts of little projects.
| floren wrote:
| When all you have is a hammer...
| foolfoolz wrote:
| i'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 wrote:
| 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".
| hinkley wrote:
| You definitely need to be able to make out an Information
| Radiator from across a room. We'll probably see a tipping point
| somewhere around a 30" screen, where you can put a large
| summary at the top, and details farther down.
|
| Is anything going on? Is it worth me crossing the room to see?
| Should I be checking my email, other dashboards, or coworkers?
| gedy wrote:
| Might be cheaper to put a printer on top of your fridge and
| automatically print calendar every morning into a plexiglass
| holder :-)
| dsr_ wrote:
| Hundred dollars for the printer, probably 20 cents a day for
| the consumables (paper, toner, electricity). The paper is
| recyclable. At one page a day, I would guess lifetime will be
| dominated by mechanical lubrication or degradation of
| capacitors, dust clogs, etc.
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(page generated 2021-10-03 23:00 UTC)