E-ink Smart Display

Summary

What are you going to build? What does it do? Why are you excited to build it?

I am going to build an e-ink smart display which is powered by a Rasberry pi. It will be able to act as a display where I can view things such as my calendar and control smart home items that I have whilst also acting as an e-reader making it an all in one device. I am excited for this build because it will allow me to have one device for which I can do everything I need to do which would just make my life simpler.

Plan

What steps are you going to take to build it? What tools are you going to use? What will you do first, second, third, etc.?

I will be using the Pi at the start to get everything set up since it is faster and easier to access over ssh. Then I will be moving the project over to the Pico so its permanently connected to thr Screen.

The sensors+accessories will be used to add functionality to the app and allowing me to make it more personalised based on my location and environment I have decided to replace the sensors kit with a Rasberry pi starter kit instead. Using items such as the wires in this kit will help me to add other features into the screen such as for example wiring a set of push buttons to the pi with some jumper wires which links in with the temperature control screen feature in the kindle allowing me to change the colour and brightness of the screen with a press of the buttons.

The sd cards will be used to flash the different os’ onto the pi

For this project I will be following different tutorials and websites with steps that I have linked below. Essentially, this project will require a Rasberry pi which I already own as well as a Rasberry pico since my pi is a slightly older version and might not be able to run the weather display. I will be connecting the Rasberry pi to the display using a kindle pw due to the display being very high quality and having features such as temperature control (the colour of the screen can be adjusted to make it more yellow / white depending on the environment and lighting conditions so it has the perfect viewing angle and readability). Idk if temperature control is exactly the right word for it but yeah. This would be achieved through the kindlepi/kindleberry tutorial. However, I also have an e-ink display which is slightly worse quality I can connect to the pi if I am unable to use the first method as a backup. I will then place this into an ikea frame I already own using some double sided tape and screws to secure the display in the frame. After this I will program the Rasberry pi to be able to display things such as weather. Specifically, I would need to make a rested api on my local network which I will link to my Amazon Alexa through IFTTT.

https://kimmo.blog/posts/7-building-eink-weather-display-for-our-home/

https://www.meccanismocomplesso.org/en/kindleberry-the-economic-ultraportable-laptop-with-kindle-and-raspberry-pi/

https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/118380/using-a-kindle-paperwhite-screen-with-raspberry

https://youtu.be/_O1FjJH591s

https://youtu.be/yDzpxlhuTck

Budget