
Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard - nromiun
https://healeycodes.com/hacking-together-an-e-ink-dashboard/
======
robocat
An alternative might be to jailbreak a Kindle 2 or 3, looks like you just need
a computer and a USB cable to do so.

[https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Python_on_Kindle](https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Python_on_Kindle)

[https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Hacks_Information](https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Hacks_Information)

The original OS runs, so what you can do is limited. There are examples of
changing the “screensaver” from Python, but I couldn’t see how easy it is to
get data into the Kindle (maybe needs USB, which would make it kind of
pointless.)

~~~
Avamander
Many Kindles have a web browser, using that wouldn't be too hard. Webkit if I
remember correctly.

Though if you aren't a total stranger to C++, a 15x cheaper (4$) e-ink display
that is just 50% the size, that can be controlled over SPI, would be nearly
just as much effort but much less maintenance. IMHO at least.

~~~
timpark
Just to note... I've been lazy and haven't jailbroken mine yet, and tested out
this weather display: [https://github.com/matopeto/kindle-weather-
dashboard](https://github.com/matopeto/kindle-weather-dashboard)

Now, although the concept of "screensaver" seems silly for a device where the
display takes no power to update, I noticed that when I left the web browser
up (disabling the screensaver as mentioned in the repo) it chewed through the
battery very quickly, in about 24 hours. With the screensaver back on, it's
holding a charge much longer. I'm going to have to jailbreak at some point.

------
xixixao
I strongly believe there is a market for a large, thin, slow-to-update e-ink
display to hang on the wall, connect to your phone, and display stuff. I'd pay
it for it, wouldn't you?

I'm talking about an end-user product, not just a component for tinkering.

~~~
luka-birsa
So far 100% of HN articles re: E Ink contain a comment like this. Sadly it is
highly unlikely that you will get something like this at an acceptable price
point.

We ([https://www.visionect.com/](https://www.visionect.com/)) have been making
non-ebook based E Ink solutions for a decade now. Except for Joan, our room
booking solution ([https://getjoan.com](https://getjoan.com)), we have not
found a customer application that could survive the low-volume incurred high
price of an E Ink solution (beyond E book readers and Note taking to some
extent).

LCDs are simply too cheap and when customers get the option of going for a 75"
color LCD display for a price of a 32" E Ink, it's a really tough sell to the
consumer. The application really needs to make sense.

If you consider yourself as an outlier from the general feedback we got from
the market, then do let me know - the 13" devices we offer come with a years
worth of battery, have WiFi built in and our software allows you to display
any web-based content or upload images. They even mount to the wall using a
magnet. You can buy one on our online store.

~~~
coob
Love what you guys are doing with Joan.

I strongly believe there's a place in the market for displays that don't feel
like displays. I don't think there's much need for interaction, but passive
emitters of relevant, useful, hyper local information that feel like a wall
feature or design piece rather than screen could have high success rate.

I built a Smart Mirror for this purpose. It was mostly a mirror, in a nice
wooden frame, but it also subtly told me when the next bus running down my
road would be and whether or not I needed an umbrella that day.

The only reason it's not back up on the wall yet is because it uses a backlit
LCD which is fine during daylight as the half mirrored glass hides this with
enough light, but at night it's all lit up. If it were backed by OLED instead
(impossible at a 24" size) it would feel much more magical.

There's lots of other ways of taking the same approach - furniture / feature
first, display second, that I think could succeed as a popular product.

~~~
godelski
I have a few solutions for you:

1) Your monitor doesn't need to be the size of your mirror. Just the size of
the display content.

2) Add a motion control or other type of sensor to turn on and off the
backlight.

------
MartijnBraam
Hah I did a similar thing a few days ago using their 6" paper display.
[https://blog.brixit.nl/epaper/](https://blog.brixit.nl/epaper/)

I chose to use the usb interface since had a server running to attach it to
already

------
amelius
> I realized I was asking Google Assistant the same questions over and over
> again. Like What’s the current weather? or What’s on my calendar for today?
> So I set out to build a small dashboard for my Raspberry Pi that I could
> check instead.

Why not use a widget on the home-screen of your phone?

~~~
yosito
Every time I pick up my phone to check a piece of information or complete a
simple task, I am presented with some other distraction that threatens to
sidetrack me. When I don't want to be distracted, I often leave my phone in
another room, turn it off, put it in a bag or even leave home without it. I've
often thought of creating my own eink devices with focused purposes to help me
get the information I need, while avoiding the distraction of a multipurpose
device like a phone.

~~~
derefr
> Every time I pick up my phone to check a piece of information or complete a
> simple task, I am presented with some other distraction that threatens to
> sidetrack me.

Feels like a _very_ good use of ML on the part of the mobile OS makers would
be to decide, based on place and time and activity history, which of your
active widgets should appear above the fold on the lockscreen of your phone.

(E.g., when near a bus stop, next-bus times should appear. First thing in the
morning after the phone has been inactive all night, the "summary of the
calendar events for today" widget should appear. Weather should appear ~5
minutes before you usually leave the house, if-and-only-if there's something
useful to know, e.g. rain predicted for today. Etc.)

I know iOS has "Siri Suggestions", which is similar, but these are activity-
history-corrleated tap-to-open links for apps, not specific actionable at-a-
glance information.

I think Google Glass tried to do this?

~~~
Polylactic_acid
Basically every kind of ML of this kind has pissed me off. It never knows
exactly what I want and every time it gets it wrong it leads to a very
negative experience. I much prefer dumb and predictable UI vs black box ML UI
that doesn't know exactly what I want.

~~~
amelius
Yes, plus now Google or some other BigCorp has to know exactly what you are
doing all the time.

~~~
derefr
It doesn't have to be cloud ML. It can run solely on the phone itself. Modern
phones have tensor cores for a reason, and _hopefully_ that reason isn't just
animoji!

~~~
amelius
Yes but they will claim they need our data for training.

------
p0llard
The article mentions turning off the display to avoid ghosting and links to an
article about screen burn in; it was my understanding that e-ink displays do
not suffer burn in? I was under the impression that e-ink ghosting is simply
due to an incomplete refresh of the display (since this causes a flash and is
time consuming)?

EDIT: Interestingly the datasheet for the component used does indeed mention
this; does anyone have any insight here?

~~~
reom_tobit
Due to the design of the screens (small capsules containing charged particles
that move back and forth to create either black or white) the capsules can
retain the charge that is passed through them if not cycled correctly.

This will cause the particles within to stay in whatever side of the capsule
they were last in, essentially causing a dead “pixel”.

If this happens across as a whole image like a logo or text, it’ll permanently
burn in.

This is solved by some flashing between colours, hence why the screens take so
long to refresh.

Up for more detailed info myself though!

~~~
Polylactic_acid
"Turning off" the screen seems like an invalid concept as the screen has no
"off" state, white pixels are just as much off as black. Seems like all you
need to do here is to just blink the screen every now and then. Even one blink
cycle per day should be enough since ereaders usually go longer than that and
are just fine.

~~~
reom_tobit
I believe the danger is not necessarily when you are leaving the capsule in
one state or another for a long period of time, I believe it is more to do
with a transition. So if you’re going from black -> black you need to cycle to
white to ensure you don’t burn the black in.

I’m not an expert though I’ve just faffed around with these displays myself a
bit. The datasheets always err on the side of caution, I managed to get maybe
3fps out of mine, but that induced a lot of ghosting. I should try to get back
to that project tbh.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
Interesting stuff. I know my old ereader would flash the whole screen black
and then white on each page flip. I'm actually really interested in creating a
little dashboard that sits under my monitor so I can look down and see some
important stats like if there are any peer reviews waiting on me and stuff
like that.

~~~
reom_tobit
yeah I believe that was the only option for older / cheaper displays. I
recently got a kindle for a present and notice that when it can, it will try
to refresh the screen as little as possible.

For example, when you press the top of the screen to bring up the settings,
only the top cycles, and then the same when you tap below to get rid of the
settings.

To that end, I would be interested in watching some high-speed camera footage
of the displays just to see the gears turn. I’ll have a look round and edit
this comment if I find any.

e: found one.

[https://youtu.be/xc6cFkCr1-8](https://youtu.be/xc6cFkCr1-8)

also a video from an engineering channel that normally gives good insight into
these things, I have watched it yet so it may not be great, but Applied
Engineering normally brings some interesting material.

[https://youtu.be/MsbiO8EAsGw](https://youtu.be/MsbiO8EAsGw)

------
jandals
It’s possible to get one of these e-ink display boards with an ESP32
microprocessor for not much more than the display alone. It has onboard WiFi
and makes for an even smaller unit since there is no need to attach it to a
Pi. It also ditches the operating system so you get an instant boot.

Programming is via PlatformIO, MicroPython or Rust (if you’re adventurous! -
Rust is not quite ready for ESP32). Has reignited my interest in coding after
a hiatus, and there is something that feels special about these eink displays.

~~~
glomph
Would it be possible to link to an example of what you mean?

~~~
mleonhard
[https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6](https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6)

------
crote
This reminds me of "UpNext – an ePaper digital calendar for your desk"[1],
which was posted on HN a month ago[2].

[1]:
[http://brettcvz.com/projects/6-upnext](http://brettcvz.com/projects/6-upnext)
[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22628348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22628348)

------
bergie
That's cool! I built something similar for our boat with a black and white
e-ink screen [https://github.com/meri-
imperiumi/dashboard](https://github.com/meri-imperiumi/dashboard)

------
sambroner
I'm loving this group of E-Ink projects. First the newspaper, then the
resources for buying the best screen, now this. Thanks for sharing. Especially
around the Image API.

I think I'll have to take inspiration from (Copy!) parts of this project
myself.

------
cmsj
I have something similar that shows when the next bus is leaving our nearest
stop.

I really like it, and I would be tempted to invest in something larger for
putting my calendar on the wall in my home office, but the big problem with
this sort of thing is that cases are always a disaster.

My bus Pi is in a really janky case because there was only really a couple
that would fit with the ePaper display on it.

If I could buy something about A4 size, in a sleek case that I could wall
mount nicely, and have good hackability on, I would absolutely do it.

~~~
diabeetusman
The Remarkable (an e-reader with a pen) is fairly hackable, but it's overkill
for a dashboard.

~~~
ben174
Also very overpriced, imo. But it seems like e-ink displays are expensive in
general.

------
louwrentius
Would it work on any wifi-enabled e-reader to just take the browser in full
screen and point it at a custom web page (auto-refresh) and be done with this?

Would it work?

------
Jonnax
I had the exact same idea a few months ago!

Google home is such an uncustomisable waste of time.

I ended up getting a 7.5 inch display from waveshare.

What I want is to know when the trains from my nearby train station leaves.

So I pulled the data off the UK National rail who have a free API.

And got some weather from the openweathermap API.

It updates every 5 minutes (well I turned it off since I'm not going anywhere
these days haha)

And it's a super simple python script that uses a simple image drawing
library.

Would recommend!

------
Drdrdrq
Off-topic: after years of struggling with obsolete Python versions (like
author here with 3.5) I have recently discovered pyenv. Never again will I be
left without f-strings! Kudos and thank you to authors.

------
samrolken
The Nook Simple Touch is available used on eBay for $10-$20, and jailbreaks
easily from the default shell to reveal a stripped down old version of
Android, with browser and other pieces.

~~~
edent
The browser is next to useless. It doesn't work with modern TLS and is pretty
buggy.

I used a custom Android app on my Nook build -
[https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/02/turn-an-old-ereader-into-
an...](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/02/turn-an-old-ereader-into-an-
information-screen-nook-str/) \- that's the only way I could get information
to display on it.

------
franciscop
I almost bought this eink yesterday to test it out, but as I'm seeing here and
I thought, it seems a bit small.

I am also considering getting a kindle and just putting a small html page on
it so I don't have to get down to the pixel-level. I remember when I tried to
use my now-defunct kindle that JS was giving some funny errors, probably
should be treated as an old browser. Been holding out to see if a usb-c kindle
comes up but people have been complaining for years now.

~~~
nrp
Inkplate may be what you’re looking for, though it isn’t shipping yet:
[https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6](https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6)

~~~
dguo
I have my eye on that one. One of the creators just did an AMA on Discord an
hour ago:
[https://discordapp.com/channels/571093131651448852/703384583...](https://discordapp.com/channels/571093131651448852/703384583252475914)

I think I'm going to hold out for the Inkplate 10 (9.7" screen), which he
mentioned when someone asked about upcoming plans.

~~~
Matrixik
This is the proper link to Discord:
[https://discordapp.com/invite/6EQjqNv](https://discordapp.com/invite/6EQjqNv)

------
dmd
I did something like this too. I definitely chose the wrong e-ink display, it
was extremely awful to work with.
[https://github.com/dmd/wxpaper](https://github.com/dmd/wxpaper)

~~~
nkozyra
Could you expound on the issues you ran into?

~~~
dmd
There's only one (very bad) font and no way to address pixels. So for
everything I wanted to do I had to load bmps (in a bizarre format) into it.
Each number is a bmp, for instance.

------
DHPersonal
I think this was what those little Chumby devices were attempting to do for
people, but they've never seemed to be that popular.
[https://www.chumby.com/](https://www.chumby.com/)

------
cuillevel3
I'm still postponing coding my own dashboard. Until then I run PaperTTY in VNC
mode to display HTML in chromium...

Refresh is horrible on the 7.5in waveshare anyhow.

------
IshKebab
This is probably an easier option:
[https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6](https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6)

------
agloeregrets
This is one of those projects that would be wonderful if it were paired with a
driver to be able to serve standard webpages on the display. Or just with a
display driver for the whole pi and Chromium.

~~~
napsy
This is exactly what the Visionect Place&Play does: can display HTML5 content
on E-Ink displays (see [https://www.visionect.com/products/place-and-
play/](https://www.visionect.com/products/place-and-play/)) and is packaged in
a neat casing.

Disclosure: I work for the company

------
Erlich_Bachman
How about just buying an e-ink reader (there is a 13inch one that also btw
works as an HDMI screen) that has a browser, and just point it to self-
updating webpage?

------
s0l1dsnak3123
I was looking into building something very similar right before I saw this
post!

