Building a WiFi Picture Frame With an eInk Display

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LCD photo frames never really caught on ā€” by emitting light, they didnā€™t seamlessly blend in with a homeā€™s decor in the way printed photos do. [Sprite_tm] decided to see if a color e-Ink screen could do any better, and whipped up a WiFi-enabled photo frame using a Waveshare display.

The part in question is a 5.65-inch display with 640 x 448 resolution, and is capable of displaying seven colors. Itā€™s not designed to display photorealistic images, so much as display simple graphics with block colors. However, with some dithering, [Sprite_tm] suspected it might do an okay job. An algorithm that uses Floyd-Steinberg diffusion and the CIEDE2000 color space takes regular RGB images and breaks them down into dithered images that are displayed using the screenā€™s 7 available colors.

The build relies on an ESP32-C3, which drives the display and fetches new images daily over WiFi. Thanks to the e-Ink screen, which uses zero power when not updating, the whole setup runs off two AA batteries and a Natlinear LN2266 boost converter.

There are some limitations; the screenā€™s color space is altogether quite limited, and images donā€™t look very high-fidelity in such low resolution. However, it does an able job of displaying photos for a device that was never designed to do so. It looks rather handsome all wrapped up as a 3D printed picture frame, and [Sprite_tm]ā€™s monkey test photos are very cute.

Files are on GitHub for those that wish to roll their own. Weā€™ve seen similar works before, like this e-Ink wall-hanging newspaper display that keeps up with the times. If youā€™ve got your own neat e-ink build, hit us up on the tipsline!



from Blog ā€“ Hackaday https://ift.tt/KAHU3eO

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