E-Ink Data Display

[parkview]

I have a Raspberry Pi based home weather station and I collect other Crypto and Currency information that would be nice to view the current information without having to visit an internal Intranet webpage.

On my May 2019 visit to Shenzhen, I purchased a number of Waveshare (https://www.waveshare.com/)e-Ink displays and controllers, one of which is a 4.2" Black/White display. The dimensions are around: 91mm wide, 77mm high and 1.3mm thick. The screen resolution is: 400x300 pixels and it refreshes in around 2 seconds. They make a very cheap and handy ESP8266 based universal e-Ink controller that can be used for any (or at least most) of their e-Ink displays: https://www.waveshare.com/product/modul ... -board.htm

Yellow/Black/White 2.9" display with a ESP8266 controller:

Yellow/Black with ESP8266 Controller

SH-2019.1.jpg (210.12 KiB) Viewed 11184 times

Even a flxible plastic display:

Flexible screen

SH-2019.2.jpg (208.42 KiB) Viewed 11184 times

Initially I thought I could have my Intranet server create a data text file and the ESP8266 would wirelessly fetch the small data file and process it and push the data out to the connected display. While I could get text onto the display, I could never get this to work exactly as I wanted. I was either doing something wrong, or there is a bug in the ??? driver software I was using. Development was painful as I had to upload the code to the ESP8266 after every change.

I had an epiphany, in that perhaps I could do all the processing on the Intranet server and create a Bitmap image, host it on the webserver and the ESP8266 could then download it at a pre-programmed interval. This means if I want to change the Text layout, or include graphs etc, It all happens on the Intranet server and I don't need to re-program the ESP8266 with an update.

Currently I have a number of small Python scripts that compile different bits of information into a text files, one per data type. Kind of left over from my initial text display attempts. I then have a master script that reads all four data text files and assembles the data onto an image canvas using the Python Pillow module (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_Imaging_Library). The image is then saved as a BMP format image file. Initially the display was only showing 50%-60% of the BMP file. Thinking it was a programming bug, or caching error, it took a while before I figured out the 150KB BMP file was too big to be displayed. I was using full colour (RGBA) canvas. Once I set the initial canvas to black and white the file size was reduced to a more manageable 16KB! A PNG based file was only 6KB, but I could never figure out how to display it.

The FreeBSD (https://www.freebsd.org/)server's CRON jobs take care of updating the Python generated text files, as different information is updated at different times (ranges from minutes to hours).

On the ESP8266 side, I used the following Libraries: GxEPD2 (https://github.com/ZinggJM/GxEPD2), Adafruit_GFX, Adafruit_SPITFT, ESP8266WiFi.

So I end up with (at the moment), a very simple text display on a 4.2" black/white display:

e-ink_4.2_sml.jpg (49.38 KiB) Viewed 11184 times

[Jubbp]

A nice write up and and pretty cool solution.

Having to load a webpage to view the temperature data is pretty painful.

This makes it available at glance without running a full machine to display it.

[parkview]

With the electronics and programming out of the way, it was then time to design up and print a housing for the display. I wanted it to sit on my desk monitor, with gravity holding it in place. I also gave it the option of sitting on a flat surface, ie Desk.

This is the Design Spark Mechanical design:

DataDisplay.2_Design.jpg (22.67 KiB) Viewed 11130 times

and here it is perched on the top of my LG monitor:

DataDisplay.1.jpg (28.94 KiB) Viewed 11130 times

I enjoyed figuring out how the four pieces could clip together and yet still be 3D printable with the minimal amount of supports.

[Jubbp]

Saw this at the last meeting and must say it looks very professional.

Great job on the design.