I recently found the author clock, and it inspired me to do my own version. I won’t actually bother with the clock function; just an e-ink display in my living room I can control. Something I can feed whatever text I like and have it rotate periodically. From a quick look around, I’m finding Waveshare, Inkbox, and TRMNL. I’m looking for something I can have some degree of remote control over so I don’t have to go plug it in constantly. It seems like all three can achieve this. I don’t love the looks of the Inkbox or TRMNL, and they’re more expensive. The wooden housing on the author clock would look really nice in my space and I’d love to recreate that. But I wanted to see how difficult it is to frame up, set up, and maintain a Waveshare before I dive in. Particularly since it seems that you need to integrate a pi for those.
This is what I use: https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-7-5-ePaper-Panel-p-6416.html
Using ESP Home Builder in Home Assistant I can push updates to it.
It works, but for me its far too much work for what it is. Updates are a pain in the hole, and come fairly frequently.
I’ve just ditched it now to be honest.
I was using it to display the weather where my wife worked each morning so she could dress accordingly. It did what it was supposed to do but was too much work. Wireless firmware updates seldom worked and it needed to be connected to a computer to reliably update.
For me personally the convenience isn’t there. Compare it to a similar sized tablet that I can run Fully Kiosk in to display a Home Assistant dashboard that updates effortlessly, and its a non-runner.
May be absolutely fine for other use cases but for me it was prohibitive. Battery life is a few months based on waking up each morning to refresh and going back to sleep until the next morning, but, you can’t monitor the battery level, a known issue with these. That simply is bananas!
I don’t know much about Waveshare, and I’ve never heard of Inkbox, but I personally have used the light faux wood TRMNL (they also have a darker one)
The best part of TRMNL is that the hardware and firmware are open source, and you can even build one out of Waveshare parts. They have an open source example implementation for a server as well.
I’ve used old pocketbook reader with some opensource libraries to make some small apps with questionable utility.
I’m doing a project of my own on an eink display. Like the other poster mentioned it’s an esp32 but it has a full dev kit. It’s called the paper v1 from m5stack. The esp32 has wifi, bluetooth, the eink display is touch enabled, it is a fully enclosed little device with a battery so it doesn’t need to be plugged in constantly. Possibly cheaper option than a pi+eink like you’re looking at, and likely uses a lot less electricity. I’ve seen videos of people who upgrade the battery in theirs. I’m not sure those applications work on it, but it’s possible something similar is built for the esp32.
i love the idea of these e-ink displays, but i need a bigger one but those that are are so fucking expensive. i’m waiting for a budget Option
I recently ordered a Trmnl, because it looks like they do what I want, and I keep not doing it as a project. I haven’t gotten it yet but ….
My impression is it’s more of a finished product, not a project. If there is a plugin doing what you want, then it’s a simple configuration. However if you want to customize, you may need to pay for a developer account
This may be totally off base from what you’re targeting, but maybe an ESP32 running ESPHome and connected to an E-Ink display such as those sold by Waveshare? https://esphome.io/components/display/waveshare_epaper/ You would probably need some separate system set up to actually generate the content displayed on the screen, depending on what exactly you want to show. It would require a fair amount of work, but would likely be the cheapest and most flexible option.
There’s a feature in ESPHome which allows the device to call a URL to download an image at specified intervals, then display it on an attached screen https://esphome.io/components/online_image/#online_image which would require running a service somewhere that generates/renders a new image at regular intervals and makes it available for download via a local URL. For just simple text, I assume there’s a simpler way to update what the device shows over the network.
