Build Tour: E-Paper Weather Display

A short look at my latest project - an e-paper based weather display!

[nielsdaemen]

2:28 It's worth it, saves a lot of power over the years! And a Pi is really overkill to just refresh an epaper once in a while! An ESP32 is ideal

[MattTube]

There is code for partial rendering so things update more quickly.

[sijumathew]

Such cool device...plead make another video on this

[giugot]

Very cool. Could you explain with more details all the steps to install and running it on the raspberry? Thank you so much

[_azaad_]

Super cool stuff. E-paper is fascinating, I wonder if you could use it in clothes to display animations. That would be next level awesome, I think you're half way there already!

[pstgh]

Very nice! Which laser cutter do you use and what's your source of acrylic sheets? Do you think we'll ever get back to RPis being readily available and cheap???? Thanks.

[KenACollins]

Nice project, thanks for sharing.

But is drawing every pixel to produce an image file the only way to render content on an e-ink display? I find your approach in the server.py code very complicated. You are drawing every little element (image or text) to produce a PNG image that you stream to the URL which show.py grabs and somehow equates each pixel to a capsule it renders on the e-ink display. Is that the only way it can be done?

I was wondering if I could just use my web development skills to serve a HTML page** at a particular URL. I would somehow grab the HTML sent back by that URL to render on the e-ink display. Okay, maybe there is still an intermediate step to take the HTML and convert it to an image that can be rendered on the e-ink display, but I could live with that.

**I was originally considering React.js but then I realized that a React app renders in the user's web browser, so accessing the URL via Python would not work, thus necessitating a complete HTML page sent from a server.

[ADadam]

Hi Andrew, cool project! I think the video would be even more engaging with more b-roll footage of the device and the build process. Looking forward to trying something like this myself!

[edcameron]

I wonder if you could use it to show playing cards as part of some kind of magic trick

[JernD]

Very nice project and video! I like your approach and recently completed a similar project using PIL and my code is also awful. I'd really like to recreate what you did here except I would like to have graphs of Temp and rain chances for a few days out. Something similar to Windy (highly recommend if you aren't familiar).

[radnukespeoplesminds]

I wish epaper 7 segment displays existed

[silentobserver]

Does the clock update partially or do you need to do a full refresh of the screen?

[User-zjxq]

Strange that you hide your api key at 8:02, but show it at 8:16.

[BrianThomas]

This is perfect for my NAS build. Are there any scripts available that will show you Pi hardware information such:

1) CPU temperature
2) IP address
3) Storage size
4) Memory usage

[MischaGielen]

WOW, that refresh !! You don't happen to have a BW-only screen available to check the refresh?

[wmilfotoradar]

hello great project. but I have a question whether it would be possible to use a 6 "display from an ebook reader in the project? because such damaged readers with good screens cost pennies and I think that such weather projects on e-book displays would be popular and cheap, especially since even a new screen e-ink for e-book 6 "costs much less than the one used in your project, best regards

[swordoftruth]

I just want to buy a eink weather station I can hang on the wall.... where .???

[rbe]

A cool project..a question, if I may..I am just getting into the epaper world..want to do a pi0w project with a 2.13 waveshare screen..do I just download a raspian lite image, modify that image, pop it in, and power up? I realize that was simply put, but do I need to do any ssh?

[eadanlin]

I wonder how long it can last without power supply

[RoyalBitch]

Hi Andrew! Any chance you could include a version where the data is pulled from the Netatmo API?