I found this guide to converting an old Kindle 4 to display anything from the web super useful. https://matthealy.com/kindle I bought another 3 used kindles for $20 each after getting it to work.
I followed this guide mostly on my PW4 and found the instructions to be a bit lacking / out-of-date.
Dropping this as a warning for people trying this out - your Kindle firmware should be < 5.13.X. You need to be very careful about auto-updates that'll undo a jailbreak so put it on aiplane mode until you jailbreak it.
After you do, I'd recommend you then install KUAL and then MobileRead Package Installer so that you can install the mod that prevents auto-updates and then you can install and control USBNetwork in a more user-friendly way.
I’ve been thinking of doing this for an automatic WFH / in office screen at work, somehow tied into a cell phone / corporate login status… Thanks for the link!
Thanks for sharing! This is indeed very cool.
He doesn't describe the page though, is he hosting a custom page he made or he is using a service that build all the info into a page?
I have an eink internal thermometer/hydrometer I bought off the shelf. Hooks up to wifi if you wanna log, works fine without it. Runs off 3 double as. The brand is govee, I don't know the rules on linking to Amazon so I'll refrain. Search Govee Eink.
They seem to be trying to limit full refreshes but they're very distracting when they happen, suggest keeping it out of eye line.
I must spend at least a couple days a year for the last 15 fantasizing about having a wireless information radiator like this.
The idea first came to me in the era before BYOD was an okay thing. It was a huge struggle to put anything on the network, like a board saying how broken the builds are. And punching holes in walls or having dangling cables is always a problem, even at home, hence wireless.
eInk is pretty much the only candidate for a device that sleeps most of the time and wakes up momentarily to poll for data.
I have an "off the shelf" weather screen (albeit color) and it was great for my house - but had an external sensor that went outside - and it took a battery (the sensor did), but it had a small slit to let telemetry air in... and it got wet in a rainstorm and stopped working, so I had to take the screen down.
I use an old ipad combined with DAK Board. No real setup required other than setting up DAK Board how you like and creating a full-screen shortcut to the page on the ipad so it shows borderless.
> Many existing projects used lower level libraries such as Python Imaging Library, but I opted for HTML and CSS. The development is fast when you can edit the HTML and immediately see the result without rendering a raster image after each iteration.
I'd like link to Slint [https://github.com/slint-ui/slint]
It has a live preview mode so you can iterate fast on the UI, and it is much more lightweight than HTML, so you could even run it bare metal on a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040)
I haven't seen anything like it in Europe either. Helsinki's library is incredible. It's also architecturally one of the most prominent buildings and right next to the parliament. It doesn't have a lot of books, though (100k)
> Amazing! I've never seen anything comparable in a U.S. library. What a wonderful resource. How do they maintain it?
Taxes. I think one big benefit of the Finnish multi-party system is you have less political bickering and more actual doing. Perhaps it leads to more efficient use of tax revenue.
Either case, we have this library (and many more not as fancy).
In live just outside of Portland, OR and we have a makerspace in our local library. It’s not hugely decked out, but it just opened so it’s a work in progress.
Mentions battery life but does not say in the end how long between recharges with the 12000mah battery.
Would really like to know power usage and how long between charges and more details about getting the pi to wake up once a day then sleep the rest of the time. Because if my maths right a Rpi zero running normally would drain the battery in less than full day.
I would imagine it runs for a long time if you are only powering it on to connect to WiFi, grab weather data, render the screen, and then shut off. The PiJuice page mentions "intelligent on/off switch", but I didn't easily find any details. Hopefully intelligent means "turn on at a certain time via an onboard RTC, turn off when systemd says it's OK" and the userspace code implements that dance correctly.
In the absence of any power control, the PiJuice page says the 13000mAh model powers a Pi Zero W for 60 hours at idle (18 hours at full load). Based on the lack of discussion on the post, this is probably what's going on, though recharging every 2.5 days is exceedingly annoying, so maybe not.
If you're doing a similar project, I really like the TPL5110 series of chips for power control. You basically connect it to your Li-ion battery, your project's voltage regulator's enable pin, and a GPIO pin. You set a time interval with resistors, and it draws 35nA while the power is "off". When the set time interval is reached, it enables the regulator, and your microcontroller boots. Do what you need to do, then set the GPIO pin. The TPL5110 then turns off the regulator and goes back to a very low state. With a 1200mAh battery, I can collect samples half-hourly and write them to a database over WiFi (with a RP2040 and ESP32) for several months without recharging. It all works very well, and would also work for the e-ink use case.
I will say that I've had random luck doing this with e-ink displays. Some freak out and generate artifacts or fade out when you disconnect power. Some don't. Often marked with the same part number. So I have no idea what's going on there. Also, be careful about what your microcontroller does when you have the battery connected to an analog input to measure the battery voltage; you can easily draw a ton of current while otherwise idle that way. Large resistors are your friend, though be aware that some say things like "you'll blow up the chip if any IO pin has a voltage on it larger than Vdd". I didn't see that in the RP2040 datasheet and it didn't blow up, but your mileage may vary.
One last note, when I've done projects like this in the past, I ended up just doing all the image manipulation on a server somewhere, and making the microcontroller just stream the bytes that the screen should display from the server. Then you never have to touch the microcontroller code, and you don't have to have a full Linux system on the client side (as this project did) with the associated power demands. $1 microcontroller > $35 Linux box. Though if you are a CircuitPython fan, this is ridiculously hard to implement because images get large fast and Python wants to read all the image data from the WiFi interface into RAM. Easier if you just write it in C.
Supporting EINK on mine could potentially help make it more visually compelling like yours, but I've done other EINK display projects in the past (see https://github.com/Mrjohns42/DoggieClock) and screen burn-in was definitely an issue.
I think I might have seen that link here, either here or Reddit.
I tweaked a few things but it's basically the same code still. I slapped a 3500 mAh 18650 in it and it's been running now for a month and a half while still showing 89% battery remaining. If that pace holds up it'll be in the ballpark of a year of operation before it actually needs to be recharged.
Once an hour it wakes up, connects to WiFi, retrieves the information, updates the display, and then goes back to deep sleep. It's awesome, other than it being too small to comfortably read where I want to put it. Eventually I'll upgrade to a larger display, but I haven't seen any offered as reasonably priced standalone modules with a WiFi capable MCU attached out of the box like this one.
I have no idea how this is not get a commercial product. Our Google Nest Home Max Hub Whatever screen that I got free from CES is garbage at displaying useful information. The weather info can’t sync at least once per week, requiring a restart. It’s literally just our bathroom clock / Bluetooth speaker because that’s all it’s good for. It cannot sync to Google Apps (business account) calendars. The proposed solution is to use IFTTT to duplicate GApps accounts to your personal account, then sync it to that. That is, frankly, embarrassing for Google IMO.
I built a MagicMirror-based Pi setup with a little 7” Lilliput screen and it works so much better, but it’s sad that over the past few decades we still haven’t solved this problem of a customizable smart home dashboard that actually works and yet does not require a CS degree to operate.
Especially since very low performance eink is all that would be required. One refresh a minute would still be useful for plenty of home dashboard applications.
I agree. There are a few e-ink displays that include battery circuitry and a microcontroller, e.g. the Inkplate series. But nobody wants to mount a bare PCB or even a one with a 3D printed case on their wall. I wish they'd sell one with a nice picture frame case.
I mean I could definitely make one, but I don't really have time and I imagine most people don't either.
I'd be happy with a generic e-ink tablet for similar projects, like work/personal calendars, pollution/humidity/temperature monitor and weather station.
I might tinker with a kindle, but I have never owned one and searching online seems to hint at kindles being locked down.
Looks great! I built a similar system a few years ago as a dashboard for a home weather station, and ended up using Joan Home devices instead of assembling the hardware from components. Highly recommend e-ink as a format for these sorts of low-key displays around the home.
As much as I like e-ink and DIY projects, those "weather displays" or "smart mirrors" always feel like a wasteful solution to a non-problem.
Fun hacks in 2022 should be bottom drawer first? Sustainably powered?
It could just be my brain compensating for my own e-waste guilt.
I’m not sure how useful that is honestly. I have a temperature reading on my HVAC thermostat. And without looking I pretty much always know what it’s set to. It tells me nothing about what to expect for the day out of the home.
I built a little e-ink display that sits inside my gaming PC recently. It shows the CPU and GPU temperature, the time, and a pretty fractal picture (because the tech part of the project was fun and then I couldn't be bothered with the design part!)
It was a really fun build, I used a 5.3 inch black/white/red panel from aliexpress and a waveshare rp2040 to drive it, hooked up to a spare internal usb header. Circuitpython made life pretty easy for the firmware, though I am thinking of rewriting it in C. This is mostly because circuitpython seems to get 'stuck' in a weird state, the host PC won't recognise it, and I have to open the case and hit the reset button. Every boot.
eink displays are such a great media for calm tech. It is a shame that it doesn't go down to a reasonable price, otherwise there would be a ton of cool devices with use cases like this.
Maybe not that big (It's 5" instead of 10") but I just bough an M5Paper for a similar use at home, probably in "collaboration" with my Home Assistant. Still haven't tested it but I've heard good things about it.
You can start developing easily using their easy development tool called UIFlow, that's block based like Scratch ( https://flow.m5stack.com/ ), or go "advanced" and use MicroPython or Arduino, as it's core is an ESP32
Awesome! I love to reading about this projects. I built my own a while back and every post somehow explores the design space slightly different.
My version[0] uses the 7.5 b/w ePaper that the author replaced, renders using LaTeX and addresses the bw font uglyness by rendering without anti aliasing in an okayish looking font. Looks good to me from a couple of meters away.
I made one recently with 7 color version of waveshare and it is a pretty cool project. It changes the picture daily or manually with a button. I will gift it to my mother after seeing how long it lasts with baterries, so far two months
I wish there was a weather station I could purchase that would do 2 things:
Give an hourly (or 2 hour) 24.. or even 12 hour weather forecast, in 6-12-24 chunks. Allow natural scrolling to see hourly forecast for further than 12/24 hours.
Give a 7 day weather forecast. No need to connect with a wind direction sensor or anything fancy, just pull from the weather.com api or anything similar
It would also not show me ads or try to track me or crash. I would even be ok dedicating a full time iPad/other device to display this.
I made a 'skyfield' widget for home assistant that shows the current position of the sun, moon and some planets as well as the summer and winter solstice paths. I really think it would be awesome for an e-ink display in the home. I've been planning to kick off that project at some point. This is inspiring.
Is it possible right now to program a bare e-ink screen for an application with lots of text and scrolling? I see plenty of e-readers out there that appear to have good refresh rate, but I always wonder if they are using special drivers to achieve this or if it's as simple as using an off-the-shelf screen with included driver that has a `scroll_down()` function.
I'm looking for a good e-ink display with touch input. I want to setup an eink calendar that can show the view for the current week, month and year and allow clicking on an event to see notes if there are any.
Really cool. I wanted to make an 3-4 inch NFC eink screen for my phone so I can read books on the go without an e reader. Anyone got expreince that could help out?
Digital photo frames are very common (LCD, not e-Ink). We bought one for my parents which even uses mobile data because they didn't have internet at home. I don't know about the Gmail requirement however.
xnx|3 years ago
spinningarrow|3 years ago
> Left to its own devices, the Kindle will go to sleep after a while, and show its screensaver.
This can be disabled by entering `~ds` in the search bar of the kindle [0]
[0]: https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2017/12/31/heres-how-to-di...
torranceyang|3 years ago
Dropping this as a warning for people trying this out - your Kindle firmware should be < 5.13.X. You need to be very careful about auto-updates that'll undo a jailbreak so put it on aiplane mode until you jailbreak it.
After you do, I'd recommend you then install KUAL and then MobileRead Package Installer so that you can install the mod that prevents auto-updates and then you can install and control USBNetwork in a more user-friendly way.
niutech|3 years ago
webinvest|3 years ago
toisanji|3 years ago
kejaed|3 years ago
dakial1|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
keyle|3 years ago
I hope we're going to see such device come to life; my bet is some successful kickstarter followed by an amazon clone with alexa built-in :vomit-face:
+1 for a simple device that does one thing, and does it well.
COGlory|3 years ago
https://www.invisible-computers.com/
ISL|3 years ago
Once they're cheap-enough, the manufacturers will come.
MivLives|3 years ago
They seem to be trying to limit full refreshes but they're very distracting when they happen, suggest keeping it out of eye line.
hinkley|3 years ago
The idea first came to me in the era before BYOD was an okay thing. It was a huge struggle to put anything on the network, like a board saying how broken the builds are. And punching holes in walls or having dangling cables is always a problem, even at home, hence wireless.
eInk is pretty much the only candidate for a device that sleeps most of the time and wakes up momentarily to poll for data.
samstave|3 years ago
Daneel_|3 years ago
helsinkiandrew|3 years ago
https://www.helmet.fi/en-US/Libraries_and_services/Helsinki_...
gregoriol|3 years ago
ogoffart|3 years ago
I'd like link to Slint [https://github.com/slint-ui/slint] It has a live preview mode so you can iterate fast on the UI, and it is much more lightweight than HTML, so you could even run it bare metal on a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040)
adql|3 years ago
Got any more details on that? Are we talking "takes half of the RP2040 flash just to initialize hello world" or something smaller ?
possiblydrunk|3 years ago
Amazing! I've never seen anything comparable in a U.S. library. What a wonderful resource. How do they maintain it?
jn5|3 years ago
https://www.oodihelsinki.fi/en/services/
shitloadofbooks|3 years ago
You can book the machines/stations out for periods of time, using your library card/account.
You have to do a safety induction to be able to book the more dangerous tools.
They also sell materials, or you can BYO.
Maxion|3 years ago
Taxes. I think one big benefit of the Finnish multi-party system is you have less political bickering and more actual doing. Perhaps it leads to more efficient use of tax revenue.
Either case, we have this library (and many more not as fancy).
sircastor|3 years ago
googlryas|3 years ago
schwartzworld|3 years ago
SigmundA|3 years ago
Would really like to know power usage and how long between charges and more details about getting the pi to wake up once a day then sleep the rest of the time. Because if my maths right a Rpi zero running normally would drain the battery in less than full day.
jrockway|3 years ago
In the absence of any power control, the PiJuice page says the 13000mAh model powers a Pi Zero W for 60 hours at idle (18 hours at full load). Based on the lack of discussion on the post, this is probably what's going on, though recharging every 2.5 days is exceedingly annoying, so maybe not.
If you're doing a similar project, I really like the TPL5110 series of chips for power control. You basically connect it to your Li-ion battery, your project's voltage regulator's enable pin, and a GPIO pin. You set a time interval with resistors, and it draws 35nA while the power is "off". When the set time interval is reached, it enables the regulator, and your microcontroller boots. Do what you need to do, then set the GPIO pin. The TPL5110 then turns off the regulator and goes back to a very low state. With a 1200mAh battery, I can collect samples half-hourly and write them to a database over WiFi (with a RP2040 and ESP32) for several months without recharging. It all works very well, and would also work for the e-ink use case.
I will say that I've had random luck doing this with e-ink displays. Some freak out and generate artifacts or fade out when you disconnect power. Some don't. Often marked with the same part number. So I have no idea what's going on there. Also, be careful about what your microcontroller does when you have the battery connected to an analog input to measure the battery voltage; you can easily draw a ton of current while otherwise idle that way. Large resistors are your friend, though be aware that some say things like "you'll blow up the chip if any IO pin has a voltage on it larger than Vdd". I didn't see that in the RP2040 datasheet and it didn't blow up, but your mileage may vary.
One last note, when I've done projects like this in the past, I ended up just doing all the image manipulation on a server somewhere, and making the microcontroller just stream the bytes that the screen should display from the server. Then you never have to touch the microcontroller code, and you don't have to have a full Linux system on the client side (as this project did) with the associated power demands. $1 microcontroller > $35 Linux box. Though if you are a CircuitPython fan, this is ridiculously hard to implement because images get large fast and Python wants to read all the image data from the WiFi interface into RAM. Easier if you just write it in C.
shultays|3 years ago
matmann2001|3 years ago
Supporting EINK on mine could potentially help make it more visually compelling like yours, but I've done other EINK display projects in the past (see https://github.com/Mrjohns42/DoggieClock) and screen burn-in was definitely an issue.
voxelghost|3 years ago
I find this very surprising, I was aware that you can sometimes get ghosting-effects, but I did not think permanent burn-in was possible on EINK tech.
wolrah|3 years ago
I think I might have seen that link here, either here or Reddit.
I tweaked a few things but it's basically the same code still. I slapped a 3500 mAh 18650 in it and it's been running now for a month and a half while still showing 89% battery remaining. If that pace holds up it'll be in the ballpark of a year of operation before it actually needs to be recharged.
Once an hour it wakes up, connects to WiFi, retrieves the information, updates the display, and then goes back to deep sleep. It's awesome, other than it being too small to comfortably read where I want to put it. Eventually I'll upgrade to a larger display, but I haven't seen any offered as reasonably priced standalone modules with a WiFi capable MCU attached out of the box like this one.
seanp2k2|3 years ago
I built a MagicMirror-based Pi setup with a little 7” Lilliput screen and it works so much better, but it’s sad that over the past few decades we still haven’t solved this problem of a customizable smart home dashboard that actually works and yet does not require a CS degree to operate.
fbdab103|3 years ago
IshKebab|3 years ago
I mean I could definitely make one, but I don't really have time and I imagine most people don't either.
cocoa19|3 years ago
I might tinker with a kindle, but I have never owned one and searching online seems to hint at kindles being locked down.
ptman|3 years ago
schwartzie|3 years ago
Some notes on my approach: https://github.com/schwartzie/weather-joan
jeromenerf|3 years ago
sabujp|3 years ago
conductr|3 years ago
Temperature != Weather
ricardou|3 years ago
Nursie|3 years ago
It was a really fun build, I used a 5.3 inch black/white/red panel from aliexpress and a waveshare rp2040 to drive it, hooked up to a spare internal usb header. Circuitpython made life pretty easy for the firmware, though I am thinking of rewriting it in C. This is mostly because circuitpython seems to get 'stuck' in a weird state, the host PC won't recognise it, and I have to open the case and hit the reset button. Every boot.
What's missing really is a 3d printed frame.
dakial1|3 years ago
pshc|3 years ago
1MachineElf|3 years ago
I wish something hackable like this was commercially available (without surveillance/data harvesting.)
tecleandor|3 years ago
https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-...
You can start developing easily using their easy development tool called UIFlow, that's block based like Scratch ( https://flow.m5stack.com/ ), or go "advanced" and use MicroPython or Arduino, as it's core is an ESP32
niutech|3 years ago
Or you can repurpose an old Kindle: https://github.com/matopeto/kindle-weather-dashboard
ptman|3 years ago
mdmglr|3 years ago
irq0|3 years ago
My version[0] uses the 7.5 b/w ePaper that the author replaced, renders using LaTeX and addresses the bw font uglyness by rendering without anti aliasing in an okayish looking font. Looks good to me from a couple of meters away.
[0] https://irq0.org/hacks/epaper-calendar.html https://github.com/irq0/comporellon
AnonGooseTown|3 years ago
I was shocked at the price of the e-ink display though. $200?! I could buy a whole Kindle for that price.
julianlam|3 years ago
https://github.com/pascalw/kindle-dash
shultays|3 years ago
Here is the video that gave me the idea https://youtu.be/YawP9RjPcJA
This screen is 63$
diziet|3 years ago
Give an hourly (or 2 hour) 24.. or even 12 hour weather forecast, in 6-12-24 chunks. Allow natural scrolling to see hourly forecast for further than 12/24 hours.
Give a 7 day weather forecast. No need to connect with a wind direction sensor or anything fancy, just pull from the weather.com api or anything similar
It would also not show me ads or try to track me or crash. I would even be ok dedicating a full time iPad/other device to display this.
acidburnNSA|3 years ago
I made a 'skyfield' widget for home assistant that shows the current position of the sun, moon and some planets as well as the summer and winter solstice paths. I really think it would be awesome for an e-ink display in the home. I've been planning to kick off that project at some point. This is inspiring.
https://github.com/partofthething/ha_skyfield
garfieldnate|3 years ago
mfgs|3 years ago
calmtech|3 years ago
I ended up ordering a case from thingiverse because the case wave share sells doesn't fit the HAT model.
My goal is to not look at my phone in the morning, so having my todos on eink is nice. When I used paper I ended up with paper lists in 7 places.
calmtech|3 years ago
prezjordan|3 years ago
[0]: https://hash.jordanscales.com/
[1]: https://inkplate.io/
mihaigalos|3 years ago
Then, the battery could be a lot smaller and the device would be sleeping most of the time.
That's possible since e-ink only draws power when updating.
nicolas_t|3 years ago
pjerem|3 years ago
nicgrev103|3 years ago
12345pnp|3 years ago
zerop|3 years ago
rwmj|3 years ago
kybernetyk|3 years ago
prodjp|3 years ago
aquanext|3 years ago
formvoltron|3 years ago
MattDemers|3 years ago
autospeaker22|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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unknown|3 years ago
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adabaed|3 years ago
sahidoona|3 years ago
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