Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rane 1509 days ago
What would make the best platform for building some kind of personal dashboard/radiator on an e-ink screen?

I guess ideally I'd spend as little time as possible on tinkering with low-level rendering code.

2 comments

I bought an inky 7 colour e-ink screen for rpi [0]. Pimoroni offers a python library that can write any image (jpg, png) to the screen.

Any rpi just fits with the gpio pins like a typically HAT. I'm using an rpi zero 2 w. Setup was less than 5 minutes.

I'm now hooking up a system that will take screenshots from a home assistant dashboard and push that to the display every 5 minutes.

[0] https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression-5-7?varia...

Inkplate, with Esphome. Expensive, but a lot of the other large-ish epaper all in one boards are not the best quality or have bad library support. LilyGo makes some nice boards too but I (and others) have had variable quality for the display itself and software support is kinda eh, though there is an Esphome component in the works that is basically complete but not yet merged. Shopping for epaper boards is a pain because there are a lot of different driver ICs with varying degrees of support/open source code; even the same model of board might use the different and incompatible drivers. Inkplate basically just works and have good QC because the displays are harvested from recycled Kindles.

https://e-radionica.com/en/catalogsearch/result/?q=inkplate

https://esphome.io/components/display/inkplate6.html