Raspberry Pi eInk Smart Screen

Smart Clock / Sysmon / Nobel-card for Raspbery Pi 3/4 using the e-Paper 2.7 inch display from Waveshare.

Originally inspired by the vekkari project by Jukka Aittola, this project has quickly evolved into a new project: a fully-featured smart clock. All you need is a Raspberry-Pi 3/4 and the e-Paper 2.7 inch display from Waveshare.

The eInk Smart Clock has multiple display modes, selectable using the four push-buttons soldered on the HAT:

Raspberry Pi Logo (sort of standby mode)
Clock (hours and minutes, day of the week, date) with 1 minute refresh interval
System statics (CPU, RAM, Processes, IP addresses)
Nobel Prize information (year, category, winner and motivation - offline dump of the official data obtained from http://api.nobelprize.org/v1/prize.json)

Data are refreshed every minute.

Buttons

Button 1: Show Raspberry Logo
Button 2: Show System Statics
Button 3: Show Clock (time & date)
Button 4: Show random Nobel info

Photos

Hardware Requirements

Raspberry Pi 3/4
2.7inch E-Ink display HAT for Raspberry Pi
8+ GB SD card

Installation

Install Raspberry Pi OS on SD card and boot the system
Open a terminal
python3 should be already present on Raspberry Pi OS - you may want to verify this by running: python3 --version
Enable SPI:
- Run the configuration tool: sudo raspi-config
- Choose: Interfacing Options -> SPI -> Yes to enable SPI interface
- Reboot: sudo reboot
Reopen a terminal
Update package list: sudo apt-get update
Install required libraries and python modules
- Install wiringPI: sudo apt-get install wiringpi
- Install required Python3 libraries
  - sudo apt-get install python3-pil python3-numpy python3-psutil python3-spidev python3-spidev python3-rpi.gpio
- Install BCM2835 libraries
  - wget http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/bcm2835/bcm2835-1.68.tar.gz
  - tar zxvf bcm2835-1.68.tar.gz
  - cd bcm2835-1.68/
  - ./configure
  - make
  - sudo make install
Go back to home cd
Install git: sudo apt install git
Fetch this project: git clone https://github.com/emanueleg/rpi-eink-clock.git
Enter the project directory: cd rpi-eink-clock and install required libraries and python modules
Run the script: ./epaper-clock.py and verify if it works as expected (hit Ctrl-C to exit)
If you want the script run at every boot, install this project as service so it could automatically run when Raspberry boots up
- copy the epaper-clock systemd unit to the default system directory: sudo cp epaper-clock.service /etc/systemd/system/
- verify if service works: sudo systemctl start epaper-clock.service
- enable this script so it could be run on system start: sudo systemctl enable epaper-clock.service
- reboot device to verify if it works: sudo reboot
- if you edit the python script, you can restart the service without rebooting the system: sudo systemctl restart epaper-clock.service
- logs can be followed with sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog | grep epaper-clock
- startup script can be disabled: sudo systemctl disable epaper-clock.service

License

Official Waveshare Electronic paper driver/libraries (epdconfig.py and epdconfig.py) are available under the MIT License.
The official Raspberry Pi Logo used in raspberry.bmp is a (TM) of Raspberry Pi Foundation (https://www.raspberrypi.org/) and available under the Raspberry Pi Trademark rules and brand guidelines
Nobel data are provided by Nobel Media AB and are available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license - see the Terms of Use for api.nobelprize.org and data.nobelprize.org
The FreeMono.ttf and FreeMonoBold.ttf fonts are part of the GNU FreeFont collection and are available under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version.
This project is a fork, hence the original license still apply to the initial edits. Since commit 02cc076 quite all the code is brand new: the license for the project is now the Apache License 2.0

emanueleg / rpi-eink-clock