eInk calendar display object
I bought a colour eInk screen last summer and had a bit of fun getting it to talk to my shared Google calendar that runs our house. Recently I finally got around to making a frame for it so it can sit somewhere prominent and tell us about upcoming events. It's basically just a raspberry pi zero hat, so it's debian underneath. There's some slightly hacky python to make it (a) talk to Google, (b) mung their API output into something useful, which turned out to be HTML which is then "screenshotted" to create a PNG which can be sent to the eInk display. Updating takes about 30 seconds in total, partly because the pi zero is slow and partly because the refresh rate of the screen is in double-digit seconds. Works in full sunlight though, which is nice, and it's a much nicer screen than it looks in photos.
Screen is this one here. Pi Zero is a pi zero, the frame is flamed oak, the base is beech, the copper is copper. If there are no events in the next week, it shows a random picture instead (and boy, if I thought rendering html was slow on a zero that's nothing on 7-colour dithering a jpg!)
Looks great! I like the arrow on the back showing which way is up for installation, a little nod to the work done underneath. Does the translation at the bottom update throughout the day? Are there other languages/dialects?
What are you doing for power?
Thanks!
It was originally meant to be wall-mounted so the rear is less finished than I would normally, but it'll be facing a wall so I've left it for now. Also that top bit is oak and I really hate working oak, so any excuse to not touch something..
It updates three times a day and will offer you a foreign language greeting for morning, afternoon and night. Currently between 12-15 languages but looking at it now I think I'll take out the Russian and put Ukrainian instead. I will add more languages though, I intend to max out Google Translate for that little bit.
The translation bit has a story, when me and my wife were saving for our honeymoon I put little flash cards around the house with bits of Japanese on them, and the one where this frame was originally going to go (near the kettle so you see it every morning making tea/coffee) said おはようございます/Ohayōgozaimasu/Good morning and for some reason that card stuck around and is still on the wall six years later. So in a nod to that I made this. Also it's nice to have some ambient learning around the house.
Power will be a usb cable running down the back for now. I'll probably find some way to hide it as much as possible in the future, but this might not be the finished form yet - we're going to see how well it works first.
This is awesome! It's a really simple-looking but really nice looking and useful thing! I'm very impressed, I've had bits of Pi and components lying around the workbench for a long time, have yet to put them together into anything useful.
Thanks!
If it makes you feel any better, I have a box full of assorted pis and interface boards and so on. Plenty of projects never get this far. For example: I've got a pi-controlled kiln I've been "working on" for maybe three years now. A pi-controlled camera-mount robot (it's got wheels and does tracking shots and pans and timelapse motion and stuff) which is even older. A pi-controlled jukebox which got 99% finished SEVEN YEARS ago and has literally never been used. The list goes on..