e-Ink Beeminder Dashboard

Most controllers let you refresh a page to eliminate the ghosting. The fanciest controllers are doing a lot of complicated things to reduce ghost buildup.

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For those interested, hereā€™s the image upload in action. Video 2 is the same thing in potato visionā„¢ and slow motion. Itā€™s trying so hard!

Right now Iā€™m simply toying around with the demo source code provided by waveshare and they say themselves that that code is horrible (and indeed it is). But the important thing is that it simply replaces the displayā€™s content with a new raster graphic completely every time. It suppose what you see on the video is triggered by this:

EPD_SendCommand(0x12);//DISPLAY_REFRESH

So either I find a more customizable version of this or I will just let this run in a loop for an hour :man_shrugging:

And obviously this complete refresh takes way longer than the 4s with the monochrome panel of GreatScott. But I doubt full refreshes are super necessary for what I got in mind.

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Quick mock up of what the website would look like on there.

This is just a screenshot of the website in Safari which I then put on the panel.
I was gonna say ā€œclearly this is not a good ideaā€ but on the thumbnail it actually looks not too bad. When viewed 1:1 though you can see the font is just too small for this to work.
Iā€™m still tempted to use the Raspberry Pi Zero W for it just so I can comfortably use some sane language instead of C.

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would you make it scroll? Or use a different display so theyā€™re all visible (something like the big grid of Android widgets)?

oh no no scrolling. This thing got 0 input. This is not a capacitive touch screen or anything. Also who would want to walk up to their wall and gently pet it?
And just look at how ridiculously slow the refresh is. Scrolling on this would be both bewildering and hilarious!

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So how would you show all goals at once? In a grid?

That would be an option. Anything that looks good in 640x384 (or 384x640 for that matter) really.
Admittedly a ā€œlittleā€ screen like this can in no way accommodate something crazy as @adamwolfā€™s zoo of 101 dalmatiā€¦ eh goals but if all goals that are in the red would fit on there, that would already be very neat I think.
I myself prefer some sort of list (with a lot fewer bits of info on them than what the website throws at you). Think of a mobile version of the website dashboard. Very mobile.

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I wouldnā€™t mind something that just showed emergency days, and then otherwise a big smiley face :slight_smile:

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maybe this is too ambitious, but iā€™m thinking of building one of these and then making a bunch of bluetooth low energy buttons that would use the beeminder API to add a datapoint through this same Raspberry Pi. Do you think thatā€™d work?

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I donā€™t see why it wouldnā€™t. Go for it!

I (and therefore any instructions of mine) are gonna focus on using the supplied Āµ controller because that thing does everything I want it to do. It got wifi and can read JSON and put text on the screen and needs very little energy and itā€™s tiny and super cheap. Thereā€™s even an online service that generates the C code to use for this embedded system for parsing a specific JSON file structure.
And I donā€™t have to mess around with setting up wifi in linux :wink:

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Maybe you could use beeminder.com/username/gallery instead.

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I wouldnā€™t find that very useful - the graphs take up a lot of space and donā€™t really help distinguish the goals. I just need the goal name and time till I have to do something.

Do you use the gallery? Do you find it helpful?

Hereā€™s my home screen:

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The e-ink screen is not a screen like some external monitor that can be hooked up to a computer.
And whilst in theory it would be possible to run a headless X server on a pi, run chrome in it, take screenshots, resize those, change the colours and paint the result as an image onto the e-ink screenā€¦ thatā€™s not fun. And nobody will want to see that. Imagine what the font would look like. No thanks.

Instead the e-ink screen got its own little set of commands to put content on it. I got a theory that those are also related to only partially updating it. I have not yet looked into this any further, though.

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Pgi, poke me if you end up needing some help. Iā€™ve done some deep work with eink controllers with regard to cold weather transitions and fast transitions in consumer products.

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so are you planning to design your own layout using data from the API? or something else?

I ask bc iā€™m thinking about doing something similar but with a smaller screen, since iā€™m a broke college student and i canā€™t drop $50 on this

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Nice! Then I shall bother you in case I get stuck.

Exactly!

I hear ya! Then I will also test it with a smaller screen size and make sure it looks decent :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thatā€™s so sweet, thanks!!

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Nice project!

If I had something like this I think all Iā€™d want it to display is how much Iā€™m on the hook for if I do nothing for the rest of the day.

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Oh hey, set up a Beeminder goal for working on this, promise to share (like instructions + pictures + code) whatever you build, and tell us your snail mail address, and weā€™ll make hardware magically appear for you! <3

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