Folks,
I’d really appreciate the community’s thoughts here. I’m planning on creating some ePaper, battery-powered dashboards. I bought a 2.66" Waveshare eInk tri-colour display with a Raspberry Pi Pico mount to experiment.
The controller generally supports two development methods – C or MicroPython.
I tried MicroPython first and was amazed at how easy it was to access HA via the REST API and display the information I needed. But there is no support for fonts/image rotation, so I couldn’t display information meaningfully.
So I decided to try C. After some wrangling, I got the Pico SDK and Waveshare examples to compile. I was super impressed with how easy it was to rotate and display information, but it seems incredibly painful to simply connect to WiFi and parse the results of the REST API!
I feel like the Pico was a bad choice, but I’d be curious to hear what other people have used for their projects. Is there a solution that gives me the best of both worlds? Simple access to API/JSON/Wifi capabilities whilst also supporting basic ePaper formatting?
I’ve seen folks using ESP32 and full RPI4s, but they’re all mains powered. I’d ideally like a battery-friendly approach.
Anyone have any advice or guidance?
Thanks!