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!



Komentáře

Okomentovat

Populární příspěvky z tohoto blogu

Bottle Plotter

Obrázek
Bottle Plotter BottlePlotter.cz      I have noticed that, it is quite common in group of small wine producers, that they don't use bottle labels. Usually they just draw some basic info on the bottle with special ( Edding ) paint marker. That is how I got this idea. Everybody can get paper label printed, but what about bottle plotter. CNC that would used paint marker as plotter to plot the label directly on the bottle. And with tool-changer you could also have more colors.         I had this idea in my head for some time, but it take me quite long time to do this mental kick-off and start to work on it. Usually, what works for me is that when the mood is right I go outside walking and fully put myself in this trans-like state where I keep iterating on that idea and create first design in my head. But the "mood" was not coming for some time, so once I have found myself forced to drive for 2h alone in car back home. I never tried this while driving, ...
Další informace

Reprogramming "old" Sennheiser SKM 3072-U - Part 1 - Intro

Obrázek
I'm somehow interested in audio production. But not it more my pet hobby, nothing that would generate decent income. This means I usually don't want to spend much of money on the equipment.  Right about now is quite good time to get some old-ish wireless audio equipment for decent price. The reason is that there was change ( info ) in wireless bands and bands that used to be free before are not available for the professional audio anymore. That means that lot of productions are ditching their stuff to buy new one, compatible. But not all the old stuff is useless as some of it can be reprogrammed. There is tight window from 822 to 830 MHz in EU. This window is quite narrow, but at least it should granted all the time for professional audio. Other option is to go below 700Mhz, but then you might get into collision with local TV transmitter. Therefore I settled for the narrow band since I don't plan to use too many transmitters at once and this should work for me well. My movi...
Další informace

Reprogramming "old" Sennheiser SKM 3072-U - Part 2 - I2C

Obrázek
 Understanding what is going on I2C In the previous step I hooked up my logic analyzer on the I2C to see how the communication inside the mic actually looks like. Partially because I want to understand better how to reprogram the microphones EEPROM but also because I'm just curious and want to see what is really going on. After powering up the microphone this is the output from I2C. write to 0x3E ack data: 0xE0 0xC8 0xF0 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00  write to 0x3E ack data: 0xE0 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00  write to 0x50 ack data: 0x10  read to 0x50 ack data: 0x11 write to 0x51 ack data: 0x1A  read to 0x50 ack data: 0xA9 write to 0x51 ack data: 0xB3  read to 0x50 ack data: 0x1F write to 0x51 ack data: 0xAE  read to 0x50 ack data: 0x03 write to 0x51 ack data: 0xAF  read to 0x50 ack data: 0x20 write to 0x51 ack data: 0xAC  read to 0x50 ack data: 0xFC write to 0x51 ack data: 0xAD  read to 0x50 ack ...
Další informace