I’d like a Clock + Weather + Select HA device display to hang on the wall somewhere without great power availability, and I don’t want a lit up solution, so E-ink seems to be the obvious choice.
The space is a 13.1" wide column between windows, and whatever could integrate the easiest would be ideal.
Any ideas? Color would be a plus, but not required. A finished appearance would be preferable to a display + eval board + battery kludge stuck together with double sided tape…
If you want control what it does there is not much standard stuff is available, though I did see something lately, don’t know where. You might want to google for that.
Home built does not have to look bad though, see:
A clock would require each minute updates, reducing battery life. Also color is quite intensive on the refresh, and partial refresh is not supported. So I’d go for a BW (two color) disply that supports partial refresh. Note that you need to buy a dedicated lipo battery because almost USB powerbanks switch off when the display sleeps and won’t come back on.
Yeah, the space was formerly occupied by a (nice) LCD clock that’s about 25 years old now and the setting buttons are a pain to make work.
Color would be nice, but B/W definitely gets the job done.
I was also thinking that clock updates once a minute could slow to once every 5 minutes or less during the night, or even more cleverly: that room is the first candidate for a human presence sensor, so updates could be once per half hour when nobody is detected.
I could always wimp out and just feed it power - I have a little Pi Pico W with a 2" display that gets weather forecast updates every 5 minutes somewhere else, it’s fed from a USB charger and the Pico actually is just a dumb display terminal with the weather app running on a PC and pushing the image updates.
It’s just that I do want the bigger e-ink look for this location, and if we’re this close to battery power-able already it would be neat to go all the way.
To follow up with options, these are about the right size for the space:
For the lower cost, I might just go E6 color and bite the bullet about running a wire to it.
Disclaimer, I wrote this sofware. It is also not in like, any kind of stable release, so results may vary.
There is a kobo e-reader variant for this, since I wanted something similar. Since these are meant as regular ereaders, they already have a battery built in.
For battery life, I only tested it with a Kobo Glo HD, and I think it lasted about 8 hours. However, that is with everything always on. If you’re comfortable with python, you should be able to periodically connect to the network, which would safe battery life.