Your portable & connected, e-paper dashboard
IoT + E-Ink = IoTink
IoTink is a portable dashboard using an e-paper display and is connected to the Internet. It is currently utilized to fetch public transport departures and weather predictions from a web service but could be easily repurposed to accomodate different use cases.
IoTink is ideal for times when you need to fetch information via WiFi and display them on a screen, but it is not feasible to install power cables.
As long as you do not need real-time or frequent updates, IoTink should be able to remain powered up on 4 AA batteries for a while.
The concept is rather straightforward, with an ESP8266 microcontroller fetching data over WiFi and displaying them on the e-paper screen. Then it goes to deep sleep until it is time to ome back online and fetch updated data.
On a hardware level, things are kept simple, with a minimum ESP8266 circuit that enables us to program the chip when necessary via UART. 2+2 AA batteries are supplying just enough voltage for the microcontroller to operate seamlessly.
- IoTink PCB rev.0
- 4.2" e-paper module by Waveshare
- ESP12F
- 4x AA battery holders (Dimensions)
- 4x 10KOhm resistors
- 100nF capacitor
- On/Off tactile switch
- 2x 3-pin male headers
- 2x Jumpers
- 6-pin female header
- 8-pin female header
- GxEPD library for controlling the e-paper display
- Adafruit GFX library for the graphics
- ArduinoJson library for parsing JSON
The IoTink project is released under a dual licensing scheme, because we are obligated to use a copyleft license for the software.
GPLv3 - The license had to be selected due to depending on GPL'd software, i.e. the GxEPD library. Pull requests that will enable this project adopt a more permissive license are more than welcome.
CC-BY 4.0