Simple E-Ink display

[zacgoodwin]

Howdy!

After doing a lot of search for the perfect hardware for this project I've come down on using a Pi zero W 2 with waveshare 2.13 e-ink touch screen and a USB2Go SD card reader and 1 TB microSD card. The benefit of this is that you can power it with a regular portable battery and you don't need an external hard drive for the storage. When you get back you can just pop it into your computer and go.

That being said; I suck with software. I was wondering if anyone had any knowledge to do something simple to display a couple things on the eInk screen

• Ready for backup
• Backing up
• Backup Completed

This is the documentation: https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/2.13inch_Touch_e-Paper_HAT_Manual#Install_Python_Libraries

I'm willing to help how I can with hardware or whatever is needed.
Thanks

[outdoorbits]

This display looks fantastic! Actually I'm a bit too busy to test it myself. For an integration in lbb it would be best and cleanest if it was supported by luma https://github.com/rm-hull/luma.core. In this case at least most of the lbb display handing could be untouched and all the functionality would be preserved. Could you find out what driver chip is used in your display and if this is supported by luma? Maybe it would be worth to ask them to support this display as they really are experts in that.

[zacgoodwin]

I am not sure if it is supported by Luma.lcd; The waveshare seems to be based on a ST7735 which Luma says it supports. LBB seems to see the display natively (though I can't set the resolution correctly and not sure if the touchscreen works correctly); it is

I check into Luma, I didn't see any documentation about e-Ink displays. They started down that path with rm-hull/luma.lcd#61 but it seems to have stalled. The waveshare seems to be a regular SPI device and in that thread it was mentioned that adding SPI devices is pretty easy for them so like you said, doesn't hurt to ask.

It looks like the waveshare screen does have it's own python libraries: Touch_e-Paper_Code\python\lib\TP_lib\
Which can be found here: https://github.com/waveshare/Touch_e-Paper_HAT

After that it looks like that library enables https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ for ImageDraw to be used the same that Luma does.

I am happy to foot any development costs / hardware costs. What I'd like to end up with is a finished configuration that I can image so I can make these quickly for my friends. Print a little container, wire up a battery underneath with an on off button, and you have something like the beedrive except actually awesome.

[outdoorbits]

LBB does not detect screens or their resolution, the values are just possible values for the known displays. So in a first step, I would add your driver and if we are lucky, that's it. I hope I will find some time this weekend.

[outdoorbits]

As the driver was already supported, I just added the resolution options for 250x122 pixels. Because the e-ink display has a low refresh rate, you will have to set DISPLAY - "Minimum display time per frame in seconds" to 2 seconds or more. Does it work? Unfortunately, the display menu will not support the touch screen.

[zacgoodwin]

Sorry for the delay; I am just getting back to this project. I'm having a bit of trouble but I think I need to spend some more time with the wiki.

[outdoorbits]

I'm still excited. What are the problems?

[zacgoodwin]

I wasn't able to get it to display anything and it didn't seen to recognize when an SD card was inserted. Didn't seem to recognize any of the readers I used either. I wonder if it's because it's an OTG port on the 0?

Going to play around to find out. If you know of any logs that would be good to post here and have a second set of eyes let me know :D