Month: March 2025

Blog

New Nerdy Project: Inky Impression Picture Frame

Posted on by jaywll

The other day (coincidentally, on Pi Day) I posted on Mastodon about picking up some new Raspberry Pi and accessories for a couple of new projects.

Well, this is the first one! I’ve constructed an e-ink picture frame.

Over on YouTube, AKZ Dev has recently posted a few videos about the hardware I’m using: a 7.3″ e-ink display from Pimoroni called the Inky Impression.

He’s also been writing some python software to power it, and while I’m sure what he’s created is great the point of this project for me is as a learning exercise, so I’ll be writing my own code.

Hardware

First of all though, I had to assemble the hardware. This is pretty straight-forward:

I may still get a wooden picture frame to put this in for better aesthetics, but for now my 3D printed version is working great. You put the Pi into its 3D printed case, the display into its 3D printed case, and then you plug them together and give it some power. Done!

I wish that the colours on the display were a little more vibrant than they are (this aspect of the display is not quite as good as I was expecting it to be) and I wish it updated a little more quickly (this is exactly as I expected it to be, and it takes about 30 seconds), but on the whole I like this e-ink display much more than I like backlit LCD photo frames.

Software

I downloaded my new favourite OS for the Raspberry Pi, DietPi, as a base and let it guide me through the setup process to connect to WiFi, set the timezone, the usual stuff. A couple of particular options to pay attention to during setup were to enable I2C and SPI, which is how the Pi communicates with the screen through the GPIO header, and install a NodeJS environment which I did simply by selecting it from the DietPi software installer.

Pimoroni suggests Python as the language to use and offers a Python library for that purpose, but I have limited experience in Python and I’m much more comfortable with Node, so that’s what I’m going to use if I can.

As a proof of concept, I wrote a half-dozen lines of code that take an input image, resize and crop it to fit the display, and render it on the screen. I’m using the sharp library for the image manipulation, and the inky library from aeroniemi to interact with the display.

const sharp = require('sharp')
const inky = require('@aeroniemi/inky')
const frame = new inky.Impression73()
sharp('../img/OriginalImage.jpg')
  .resize(800, 480)
  .toFile('output.png', (err, info) => {
	frame.display_png('output.png')
	frame.show()
})

So far this is working great. I obviously plan to extend this, and I’ll make the eventual code available if anyone else wants to replicate what I’ve done. Features I’m currently thinking about are:

  • Connect to a specific album in my Google Photos account
  • Rotate through the images in the album, updating every five minutes or so
  • Ability to skip forward and back using the buttons on the side of the display, maybe
  • Ability to skip forward and back by issuing a command over MQTT (of course I’m integrating this thing with Home Assistant)
  • Ability to display some specific content (other than the usual album) based on an MQTT command or button press… what I’m thinking of here is my WiFi username and password that I can interrupt the slideshow to display for guests along with a QR code with the connection details
  • Maybe the ability to display a webpage by loading it headlessly and taking a screenshot (I believe AKZ Dev’s software can do this and it seems like it opens up lots of possibilities)
  • Maybe a REST API in case I want to use that rather than MQTT

This’ll all take me some time and I’m not in a rush, but I’ll post more as I work on it!

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Shrapnel
Posted on by jaywll

Earlier in the week I wrote a blog post about how I set up my Office display using a Raspberry Pi 3B+

Today I picked up a Pi 4 and a Pi Zero 2 W for other projects (watch this space!) and I was curious how they’d perform. So I raced them. From the time I press the “power on” button on my TV remote to the time they’re displaying a webpage.

DeviceTime
Raspberry Pi 3B+1:05
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W1:25 (+20 secs)
Raspberry Pi 4B (4gb)0:49 (-16 secs)

This is not super-scientific. I think the 3B+ is usually faster except it took longer than usual to obtain an IP address during its boot process. 🤷🏻‍♂️

What was most interesting to me was the differences between the 3B+ and the Zero 2W: the initial parts of the Zero’s boot process were quicker than the 3B+, but as soon as it got into dealing with graphics and opening the browser it slowed down dramatically. Even changing from one screen to another in my dashboard and reloading page elements were slow enough that I would need to change my dashboard layout. It really wasn’t performant enough for what I’m doing.

The Pi 4, unsurprisingly, performed great – although the difference between the 3B+ and the 4 wasn’t as big as I thought it would be. The Pi 4 is also too power hungry to be powered by my TV’s USB port, which is a really nice feature of my setup.

Whether by luck or judgement, the setup I have is the one I’d recommend if you want to do something similar. I’m almost tempted to buy more Pi 3s in case I want to replicate it somewhere else in the house.

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Blog

How to build a dashboard display with a Raspberry Pi

Posted on by jaywll

Skip intro >>

In my office I have a TV on the wall that shows me some pertinent info about what’s going on with our house (thanks to Home Assistant and our array of Smart Home sensors) and the weather, and rotates the display between my calendar, a Google Map with the local traffic overlay, and a view of our security cameras.

I’ve had it for many years and I set it up by (mostly) following a 2016 guide.

The whole thing runs on a Raspberry Pi 3b which I love because I can power it using the USB port built into my TV. The low-power hardware makes optimization critical, hence why the Pi is set up with just enough software to run a lightweight web browser and nothing more.

I’ve recently been on a bit of a journey of switching to Linux for almost all my computing – more to come on that in a future post – which has led me to go through all my devices one by one and get them set up the way I wanted. That inspired me to take a crack at the office Pi too.

It was working just fine before I touched it so I wasn’t necessarily expecting to make any changes, but I thought it might be good to see if the software options identified nine years ago are still the most optimal.

No they’re not as it turns out, so here’s my updated guide on setting up a Raspberry Pi to display a web page (and nothing more, nothing less).

The Operating System

My first change was the base operating system. I switched to DietPi. Download the image for your particular device and install it. There are instructions on the DietPi site if you need them.

Work through the DietPi setup process that automatically launches when you first boot the drive and log in, in particular:

  • Set the localization options (keyboard layout, system locale, timezone)
  • Connect to the internet – in my case I used the Pi’s built-in WiFi – and optional but recommended: disable any connections you won’t be using (e.g. wired Ethernet) so they don’t slow the boot process
  • Enable SSH if you want it
  • Set autologin as root – generally it would be good practice not to use the superuser account for day to day operation and instead set up another account with only the privileges needed, but this setup is so basic we’re not going to worry about it
  • Don’t install any of the software packages – we’re going to carefully install only what we need

For some reason my networking settings didn’t take effect on first setup and I had to reboot and repeat that part of the setup by launching dietpi-config from the command line.

The Software

Our goal with the software we install is two-fold:

  1. If we don’t absolutely need a piece of software, we’re not installing it
  2. We want the software we are going to install to be as lightweight as possible

All we want to do is display a web page on a display. We don’t even really need users to interact with our system. To get this done we’re going to need an X server, a window manager, a web browser and couple of utilities to tie everything together. Let’s get it installed:

apt update
apt upgrade
apt install xserver-xorg x11-xserver-utils dwm surf xinit unclutter

We’re using the X.Org X server, the dwm window manager and surf browser (both from suckless.org), and we’re installing unclutter to hide the mouse pointer when it isn’t in use.

Configuration

First we’re going to create a startup script: nano /root/startdisplay.sh

#!/bin/bash
# Disable DPMS (Energy Star) features.
xset -dpms
# Disable screen saver
xset s off
# Don't blank the video device
xset s noblank
# Allow quitting the X server with CTRL-ATL-Backspace
setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
# Disable the mouse pointer
unclutter &
# Run window manager
dwm &
# Run browser in full-screen mode
surf -F https://www.google.com

Replace https://www.google.com above with the URL of your dashboard, then press Ctrl-O to save the file followed by Ctrl-X to exit nano. Next, make the script executable:

chmod +x /root/startdisplay.sh

Finally, edit /root/.bashrc and add the following three lines at the end:

if [ -z "${SSH_TTY}" ]; then
  xinit ~/startdisplay.sh
fi

This will start X and run our startdisplay script when the root user logs in directly to the device, but not if they’re logging in over SSH (where it wouldn’t work anyway).

And that’s it, done! Reboot your Pi and enjoy your display.

My Pi3B takes around 45 seconds from power on to the point where it’s displaying my dashboard web page, which is less than half the time the previous software setup took (the hardware has remained the same throughout).

The Exciting Conclusion

I’d love your feedback on all this. Is there an even more efficient setup I’m missing? I’d also love to hear about your use case.

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