• phx@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I build a digital picture frame using an 8-color e-ink display and a pi pico.

    It works great within its limitations, but the limitations are still pretty big

    • 8 colors is pretty limited, especially when it’s a specific 8 colors (not just 8 max).
    • Refresh times are slow
    • The pico memory and storage are limited
    • Due to the above, mine ran in two cycles with a reboot between to clear memory. One to pull images from my website and another to cycle through existing pictures until it needs to grab more
    • Images needed to be converted to the appropriate size+ 8-color palette and dithered etc beforehand into a format the pico can read (hence then being on my website where they were reduced to an uncompressed palletized BMP)

    Obviously a commercial product could probably do better, or a better screen, but faster-refresh or higher-color tends to jump in price quickly.

    Still, it was pretty cool to have a device that would not need power to persist images, and used only a little during the process of loading new ones so could be powered by battery/solar

    • CoffeeBot@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I’ve thought of doing something similar, the other fun part is that you could stash a big battery behind the display and run the E-ink on a super slow refresh rate since they only use power to refresh. I wish E-ink wasn’t so ridiculously expensive. This monitor would be perfect if it weren’t $1200.

      • phx@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        This is the one I got. It’s not terribly expensive but yeah it does have limitations in terms of colors and refresh times