Yet Another E-Ink Picture Frame

 Yet Another E-Ink Picture Frame

In our family we have group on WhatsApp. To simply share some photos and updates. What bothers me is that our Grandma does not have smartphone, computer even internet and therefore she can not access WhatsApp feed. At first I was thinking about some way how to provide convenient way to share pictures of our children with her. One of the options was to use some old tablet and run WhatsApp there, but this would require some operation to turn the tablet on during the day, maybe restarting it from time to time. It would also be quite data hungry. Then I stumbled over these new fancy 7.3" color E-Ink displays on Pimoroni. And got an idea.


Print frame for it attach some single board PC to it and let it ask for update from public web server. For connection I would use LTE WiFi modem. 



Important feature is that everything should be simple in way that I can finish this project. So it won't  be yet another unfinished project under my table!



Tech Stack

  • Front-End - pure Java Script with JQ
  • Back-End - PHP
  • Frame - Python script run by Cron and PHP for web portal

Public front-end

For now simple web front-end so that anyone can take picture and then upload it. When you take picture with your camera, it is then saved on server and then if frame ask for update it gets served to it. Images are save as JPEG with high compression ratio to save data from LTE connection. As the quality of E-Ink display is not that great (compared to LCD) it really does not matter much.



Frame HW

For the Single board PC I went with Banana Pi M2 ZERO which runs Armbian, not that fancy as RaspberryPI, but available and cheaper. It is simply attached to GPIO backside connector on the display and uses WiFi for connection to internet. If it can't connect to any WiFi it creates hotspot with simple web UI where you can choose SSID of WiFi to which you want to connect. 
Frame is 3D printed from one piece with just one extra piece to hold the WiFi antenna on back side. Have to say I'm quite happy about the frame design.





Result

I'm quite happy with how it works there is something funny/interesting in way that somebody can send you picture. And it give us way how to keep our grandma still in touch even without having access to social networks. I would just wish that the display would be better, sometime the picture looks great sometime it is washed out. But this is trade of for using E-Ink. The benefit is that it is not annoying as glowing LCD and in future it might be possible to run it from battery. 
 There is still plenty thing I would like to solve, like authentication for uploading pictures or some queue of new pictures. But I will grab some feedback when it gonna be used!



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