[HN Gopher] E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered...
___________________________________________________________________
E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
Author : edward
Score : 636 points
Date : 2021-10-03 20:59 UTC (1 days 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-...
| nisegami wrote:
| This is incredible for something I have in mind. Going to do
| a bit more reading, but the price and size are ideal for my
| use case.
| 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$!
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| I'm waiting on the dev board they sell on waveshare.
| Definitely affordable under $20.
|
| For this type of project the esp32 seems like the better
| choice than the pi zero.
|
| There's also the RP2040 if you want work in the pi
| ecosystem. Arduino and u-blox have those with wifi I think
| dmitrygr wrote:
| re: #4
|
| Watch out for a few things:
|
| 1. Refreshes are much slower on 3-color eInk panels than on
| monochrome ones (eg: 20 sec vs 2)
|
| 2. Partial refresh on 3-color panels is rare and quickly
| gets messy around the edges. Partial refresh on monochrome
| panels is a relatively simple thing to do.
|
| 3. Greyscale on a 3-color eInk screen is VERY VERY VERY
| hard! Officially it is not supported at all. By any 3-color
| panel. I made it work [1] but even then, it is very very
| slow (bordering on a full minute per refresh).
|
| 4. Stock waveforms are rarely good. And almost no vendor
| will give you proper temp-compensated partial update
| waveforms. Developing your own waveforms for monochrome
| panels is easy and simple (~day). Developing your own
| waveforms for 3-color panels is a lot of work (~weeks +
| more weeks once you need to support more than just "21-25
| celsius")
|
| [1] http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=29.%20eInk%20Price
| %20Ta...
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| Check out the Inkplate - a great e-ink platform for all these
| projects and more:
|
| https://inkplate.io/
| x0x0 wrote:
| Here's code that works with inkplate from a previous hn post
| :)
|
| https://rahulrav.com/blog/e_ink_dashboard.html
|
| Rahul got oauth2 flows working to get google calendar access.
| lawik wrote:
| Google Calendar provides a calendar URL which might be more
| convenient.
|
| Used it in this thing:
| https://github.com/lawik/calendar_gadget
| 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.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| It's because it's not lit. It looks natural, and unobtrusive.
|
| I'd love to have this, art, and other "appliances" and slabs
| with eink. Ex. My todo list. My email etc.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I think they capture the feel of the black-and-white LCD
| digital watch world from before color display android
| everything ubiquity.
| varispeed wrote:
| Probably that's why you can't make money on it at scale that
| you can with any addictive type of device and so it's not
| attractive for most entrepreneurs - a lot of work to put in
| and not enough money to even buy a Cessna.
| sebcat wrote:
| Target the high-end? There might be a demand for a device
| with an e-ink esthetic which takes care of, I don't know,
| planning the days of rich people? An actual need instead of
| a manufactured want? Or maybe the lower power consumption
| of an e-ink display can make it useful in other areas not
| yet identified instead of consumer products?
| konschubert wrote:
| I'm trying to make it work as a product. I tend agree it's
| a super niche market though.
|
| https://www.invisible-computers.com/
| 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 ~$50
| politelemon wrote:
| I've been using another eink project dashboard, which cost me
| less as the screen is a smaller one, but it doesn't have
| colour: https://github.com/mendhak/waveshare-epaper-display
| userbinator wrote:
| This one might be cheaper: https://github.com/zephray/NekoCal
|
| ...from the same guy who did this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284
| ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote:
| Agreed. I'm surprised the NYT won't sell me an official version
| of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25063726
| w3p706 wrote:
| I buy old kindles for this, ~50$ 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
| bpye wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Check out http://fread.ink/
| krzyk wrote:
| Tried that, but when I was at the process of soldering the
| cables to the debug ports, the "solder spots" came out of the
| board :(
|
| Now I need to press hard with a needles to make the serial
| port work - so it is quite hard to setup - at least until I
| install sshd there and setup wifi to make it work wirelessly.
| karlkloss wrote:
| Do you have a list of compatible kindle models, and how to
| identify them?
| w3p706 wrote:
| I use most the paperwhite 2nd generation (212ppi
| resolution) as this had good availability and price. but
| the devices are quite hard to keep apart
|
| the mobileread forum ist full of good information e.g.:
| https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=267541
| chadd wrote:
| i bought the 6" display from eink.com to build a small personal
| art project - an infinite scrolling procedurally generated
| landscape based on this project -
| https://github.com/LingDong-/shan-shui-inf
|
| A few gotchas:
|
| 1. some of these eink boards are hard to procure as a consumer.
| the vendors want you to be a company
|
| 2. the driver boards are purchased separately, are definitely
| required, and sometimes have windows software (vs easy to use
| rasp-pi drivers)
|
| 3. support is often difficult or from the OEM so english-
| language communication can be difficult.
| adiM wrote:
| This is very interesting. Do you have a write up on the
| procedurally generated landscape part?
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| It was posted recently, so there's some discussion here[1]
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23469233
| 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
| leokennis wrote:
| I think I know why these look so attractive:
|
| e-ink is the perfect blend between technology (screen can
| display whatever you want) and the analogue/physical world (it
| looks like a piece of paper which you can put in a wooden frame
| and interact with).
|
| Another example for me is the "Buddha Machine" by FM3
| (https://www.fm3buddhamachine.com): it's basically a box that
| plays some ambient loops (technology) but it looks like a small
| and unthreatening transistor radio with nice tactile buttons
| (physical).
| dirtyid wrote:
| At the same time, disapointed reminder of the lack of the
| progress on cheap large eink displays.
| RBerenguel wrote:
| A Raspberry Pi Zero and Pimoroni's Inky Impression are a very
| easy cheap setup to have a cute eink gizmo. Here's a twitter
| thread I posted with some images of it working:
| https://twitter.com/berenguel/status/1344016064196304899 and
| links to the screen as well.
| 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.
| clash wrote:
| This 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/
| BozeWolf wrote:
| Really well done!! Looks great. Although price seems
| reasonable, it is still quite a lot of money.
|
| Did you actually sell screens already? I can imagine design
| stores want to sell this.
| clash wrote:
| I went online about a year ago. So yes, I already sold a lot
| of devices.
| iota7 wrote:
| The 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.
| stroz wrote:
| Super cool concept, thanks for sharing!
| konschubert wrote:
| Hey 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/
|
| 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 :)
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| This looks great! Two questions if i may:
|
| 1. Any plans to release some general purpose version of this?
| Ie i'd love to buy this and hook it up to an HTML webpage i
| generate or something. Then it's flexible to whatever i want to
| show on my dashboard.
|
| 2. Any plans for how consumers should power this hanging on a
| wall? Since it's wired it looks like.
| konschubert wrote:
| re 1:
|
| In principle that's something that I could enable eventually.
| It's a nice idea. I'll think about it.
|
| re 2: There is a standard usb plug at the far end of the
| cable. It can be plugged into a usb charger.
| IshKebab wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| If 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.
| chubs wrote:
| Looks fantastic, good luck with it :)
| [deleted]
| WithinReason wrote:
| Completely off topic, but you could have followed "Breakfast at
| Tiffany's" with "Dinner with Andre"!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Dinner_with_Andre
| drited wrote:
| You weren't lying about being completely off topic.
| kokey wrote:
| I'm delighted to see the e-ink displays prices coming down, even
| though it's coming down a bit slowly.
| DantesKite wrote:
| Imagine wallpaper sized e-ink displays.
|
| would make for some amazing, decorative art.
| crzysdrs wrote:
| I 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
| afs27 wrote:
| Is anyone making E-Ink displays for NFTs?
| paulcarroty wrote:
| Great 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.
| vesuvianvenus wrote:
| Nice 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| IIRC 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 wrote:
| This 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.
| 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
| seneca wrote:
| The price of displays has come down. Color e-ink is new tech,
| and as such is more expensive.
| sysihyk wrote:
| Problem is - three-pigment e-ink was a new tech 10 years ago
| and still of luxury niche.
| 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.
| blackoil wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| It 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)
| GTP wrote:
| Looks great, IMO you could bring down battery usage by using an
| ESP8266/ESP32 instead of a Raspberry PI
| busymom0 wrote:
| I would love to build something like this but the price of these
| screens is insane :(
| killjoywashere wrote:
| You know what would be cool? An e-Ink glassboard. You need a
| graph grid? Check. Need a smaller grid? No problem. Stylish
| picture, sure.
| 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?
| kelnos wrote:
| You don't really need to "hibernate"; shutting the entire
| system down and booting from scratch on each update is
| simpler and probably more reliable.
|
| The problem (hibernate or not) is getting the Pi to wake up,
| since it doesn't have a real-time clock. OP is using a RTC
| hat to achieve this. I do wonder what kind of power
| consumption it uses while sleeping.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| what a colossal kludge. what you're trying to accomplish is
| basically embedded programming 101: sleep mode + wakeup
| timer. RTC? pff.. even any MPU on-board oscillator with no
| crystal has good enough PPM and lower power than an RTC.
| your solution is like hunting quail with a nuke.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| yes, but trying to generate a nice rendered image on a
| stand-alone uProcessor is pretty hard.
|
| I don't like that it takes headless chrome to render, but
| it _works_ and fills a need for the maker.
|
| I'm pretty sure they looked at the stuff they'd need to
| write (A layout engine, a anti aliasing library, a
| calendar parsing library, an image handling library) and
| thought "fuck that, lets use a pi".
|
| It terms of time thats weeks full time, and even then
| might not be possible to fit on the uCPU of choice.
|
| just buy a realtime hat with wake up ability, for $40
| max, boom job done moving to making the thing look good.
|
| Its not a product, its someone's hobby, leave them be.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > trying to generate a nice rendered image on a stand-
| alone uProcessor is pretty hard.
|
| Did you see the rendering? It is very simple, and does
| not require PIL. There are plenty of embedded GUI
| libraries that are specifically for this kind of
| application (uFX, Qt). Why not learn something new?
|
| I want HN to be a place where experts critique ideas, not
| a Facebook/Instagram like-fest ego-stroke. I was
| proposing a deeper dive to the OP so that s/he could
| develop better skills. I wasn't mocking OP, but I was
| mocking your bad idea because you didn't make anything,
| you just threw out a naive suggestion.
|
| Did you come here to learn or to get some karma for a
| dopamine hit?
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| micheljansen wrote:
| I guess you could offload the rendering to a server, but then
| it's no longer a self-contained, standalone solution. Trade-
| offs!
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I was going to say, I feel like an ESP32 might be a better fit
| for this, given that it's designed for deep sleep.
| 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
| dheera wrote:
| Oh 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.
| 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.
| konschubert wrote:
| The high-level client in esp-idf handles ssl out of the
| box and comes with a list of pre-installed root cas.
|
| The question, of course, is: What if these CAs expire?
| 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.
| baybal2 wrote:
| ESP32 is a very generic synthesized chip, not particularly
| ULP oriented.
|
| On other hand, it's the most developer friendly company out
| there.
|
| I've been unsuccessful getting any proper reaction from
| Innophase about SDK support. Their sales seem to not even
| understand what we are wanting from them, and keep sending us
| "enter these AT commands through USB-TTL"
|
| ESP32 is also pretty much the one, and only wireless MCU you
| can buy on the open market, in any quantity, on a short
| notice. Nothing else comes with the supply chain security
| like this.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _ESP32 is a very generic synthesized chip, not
| particularly ULP oriented._
|
| Maybe not, but setting it up to sleep most of the time and
| only boot once a day to fetch the calendar and update the
| display should sip power pretty sparingly; I expect you'd
| get months if not a year or more before needing to recharge
| the battery.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Is e-ink fundamentally more expensive to produce, or is the
| quantity produced just not enough right now?
| emsy wrote:
| I remember reading somewhere on HN that it's a patent/monopoly
| issue but I didn't verify.
| 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.
| pshc wrote:
| I would volunteer LaTeX but that's also 100s of MBs/GBs of
| dependencies to be fair. Perhaps an SVG rasterizer would
| suffice here.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Simpler 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 wrote:
| I would not be surprised if a corporation would spend
| $100Ks on tech selection and end up with a headless Chrome
| too.
| 41209 wrote:
| All 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 wrote:
| When all you have is a hammer...
| adrianmonk wrote:
| PostScript, 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), I
| was able to get it to draw some text in a few minutes.
| salawat wrote:
| That 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.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Why tough? It works. What exactly is wasted here? 100MB for
| Chrome binary and that few percent of CPU hike while
| rendering the image? Is it worth wasting endless hours of
| time researching some niche, quirky, badly documented drawing
| library, where the hard earned end result has absolutely
| negligible difference from a human standpoint? Machines work
| for us, not reverse.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| clever and horrifying are not mutually exclusive
|
| he solved the problem with the tools he had, without spending
| time learning an alternative graphics layout system. I'm
| curious what you'd recommend as rudimentary tho, I would love
| to see such projects on lower power devices, but if you
| already need the Pi to talk to the ePaper, I don't see the
| harm in burning a few cycles rendering a webpage to get the
| result you want.
| rfrankenstein wrote:
| "Premature optimization is the root of all evil"--Donald
| Knuth.
| emsy wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| I wonder what the reason is for this solution. He must have
| one.
| kevinsundar wrote:
| His GitHub says this: "This might sound like a convoluted
| way to generate the calendar, but I'm doing so mainly
| because (i) it's easier to format the calendar exactly the
| way I want it using HTML/CSS, and (ii) I can better delink
| the generation of the calendar and refreshing of the eInk
| display. In the future, I might choose to generate the
| calendar on a separate RPi device, while using a ESP32 or
| PiZero purely to just retrieve the image from a file host
| and update the screen."
|
| https://github.com/speedyg0nz/MagInkCal/blob/main/render/re
| n...
|
| Its easy to design something nice looking in html and css
| and compute is cheap. Seems like a fine solution to me.
| Maybe even better since you can push the image generation
| somewhere else and just have the RPI update the screen with
| an image which would save lots of power.
|
| I've tried making nice interfaces with GUI toolkits and its
| a nightmare.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| He has a valid point, generating the image on a separate
| device (heck, you could do that on AWS Lambda for free)
| and only grabbing the resulting image could vastly
| improve battery life. Then you could also switch from a
| power hungry Pi to a simpler choice like an ESP32.
| edoceo wrote:
| Cause 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 wrote:
| I was going down this route once, trying to use Inkscape
| headless. Is there a SVG-2-bitmap tool you can recommend?
| mkl wrote:
| Another one is rsvg:
| https://www.tutorialspoint.com/unix_commands/rsvg.htm
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Check out https://github.com/RazrFalcon/resvg
| edoceo wrote:
| Imagemagick. Does everything.
| [deleted]
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Somehow I missed that ImageMagick reads SVG, that is a
| much shorter dependency stack than selenium! Thanks
| userbinator wrote:
| People gluing together lots of stuff to making something
| barely-working and massively inefficient is not a new
| phenomenon. Unfortunately, all the "maker movement" seems
| to have done is encourage it more. Careful design,
| knowledge and learning is being discouraged in favour of
| superficial understanding, copy-pasting, tweaking-until-it-
| works. They don't want to spend the time to learn the
| basics. I was recently saddened to see someone who had
| published code for a tiny project in Asm being asked if
| there could be "an Arduino version".
|
| Some related philosophical discussions on that here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8679471
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| > Careful design, knowledge and learning is being
| discouraged in favour of superficial understanding, copy-
| pasting, tweaking-until-it-works.
|
| This is like poo-pooing amatuer woodworking and saying
| "people should really become an apprentice first" - no
| one who has the education to do careful engineering is
| being discouraged, the field of hardware and software is
| now within reach of people who just wouldn't take on any
| of these projects 10 years ago.
| userbinator wrote:
| _no one who has the education to do careful engineering
| is being discouraged_
|
| They are, because they think this stuff is just as good
| --- and it clogs the search results for those who do want
| to dig deeper. I often have to add "-Arduino -Maker" and
| a bunch of other filters to my search results to find the
| actually useful stuff.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| This stuff IS good! It inspires people to task themselves
| with projects they don't yet know how to do, and blog
| about what error codes they received and what they did to
| fix it.
|
| Besides, how can you look down on them when you're
| googling for answers instead of, you know, RTFM / getting
| your engineering degree?
| tejohnso wrote:
| I 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-epape...
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Ah 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?
| sincarne wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Just curious but is it the lack of mass production or something
| sinister like patents / monopoly?
| Maxion wrote:
| Patents & monopoly
| rcarmo wrote:
| Well, 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 wrote:
| Apparently, 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
| eli wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| At least this [1] article seems to indicate the presence
| of patents
|
| [1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171220005895
| /en/E-I...
| mannykoum wrote:
| He doesn't seem to ever provide any evidence for his
| claims other than a repeated "I work in the display
| industry"..
| robinsoh wrote:
| I think you've misunderstood my comments.
|
| I saw this recurring theme on HN that electrophoretic
| panels were expensive due to patents and evil misdeeds by
| that most evil corporation called E-Corp.
|
| I thought, hey, I work in this bloody display industry
| myself where everything is about volume, volume and more
| volume, and I hangout with their guys at conferences and
| events, and I've never heard such a thing as them using
| patents to attack other industry players. Are they really
| attacking people and hurting customers that want to use
| their technology as alleged?
|
| So I asked a simple question each time I saw that claim
| that E Ink uses patents to attack startups or similar
| claims. What's the evidence?
|
| And guess what. Now it turns back to people like you who
| ask what is my evidence that there's no evil misdeeds.
| And to which I just feign shock, oh no, it must be true
| then, since a lack of evidence for them being innocent of
| the alllegations must mean they are guilty.
|
| So we're left back at square 1. I hope people with a
| smarter mind than mine can arrive at whatever the correct
| conclusions are.
| riobard wrote:
| Could you please tell a bit more about the volume-side of
| story? Somehow I feel that E-ink is at this weird point
| on the cost/volume curve because it is a fundamentally
| flawed display technology: monochrome or a couple of dull
| colors at best, very slow refresh rate (with
| ghosting/leftover on partial refresh).
|
| LCD/OLED displays were also very expensive initially, but
| because they're so much appealing universally, loads of
| money got poured into the industry to make them better
| and cheaper (mostly due to volume demand).
|
| There's no such amount of money/interest in making E-ink
| better and cheaper :(
| robinsoh wrote:
| Please search my comment history for what I posted about
| electrophoresis and physics. I don't think they'll be
| able to get past the physical limitation. To summarize,
| you either move ink fast but end up losing bistability,
| or move ink slow, as it is currently. Most people don't
| realize electrophoresis has remained at about 700ms for
| an update over the last decade. Tricks like A2 sure with
| the Dasung, but nothing substantial.
|
| As for the comment about "money/interest", see my
| comments about why a venture capitalist would have little
| interest in spending billions trying to create new
| display tech and fighting hard expensive physics problems
| when they could get higher rate of return by investing in
| another software service or ML/AI company. That said,
| Jeff Bezos spent hundred million or more on trying to get
| Liquavista working, Qualcomm spent lord knows how much on
| Mirasol. Great demos, but just couldn't get the process
| scaled or reliable enough to commercialize. Physics is
| hard. Physics is expensive.
| evandwight wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27831868
|
| Seems to be a meaty thread if anyone else is curious.
| riobard wrote:
| Thanks a lot!
|
| VC money is unlikely the source for this kinda of
| industrial research and bumpy road to scalability.
|
| LCD/OLED panels got so cheap largely due to
| Korean/Japanese/Chinese government subsides. I doubt any
| of them will do so for e-ink.
| ppod wrote:
| Is there any kind of projector display might would work for
| this?
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| I just used an old eBook reader I had lying around. It shows
| the weather forecast.
| travisporter wrote:
| Did you repurpose the screen or use the e-reader software to
| point to a data source?
| sysihyk wrote:
| I think Pi Nano will be seriously underworking in this setup.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| When 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
| teddyh wrote:
| * 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 wrote:
| > 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?!
| teddyh wrote:
| No. That's a feature.
| romseb wrote:
| Install the "Handwriting" plugin on the human component. It's
| slow, but works reasonably well.
| headmelted wrote:
| Well, I mean, it also syncs automatically with google - which
| is kind of the whole point.
| 9935c101ab17a66 wrote:
| Do you feel this comment has contributed anything to discussion
| around this post?
| teddyh wrote:
| Yes. 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.
| password4321 wrote:
| I'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.)
| 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".
| JonathanFly 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".
|
| 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 wrote:
| A 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.
| 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 :-)
| pjerem wrote:
| That could be actually nice!
| 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.
| freemint wrote:
| Hundred dollars for the printer, I think Zou are absolutely
| over spending here. Electricity can be saved by having
| shutoff and turn on with a timer.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Seems like an ideal use for a large e-ink display, useful
| reference information that doesn't change often. Cool.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-04 23:02 UTC)