Use ESPHome with e-ink Displays to blend in with your home decor!

dariusk · August 6, 2025, 5:42pm

I got this working! It shows:

current temperature and weather icon
row of temperatures and weather icons for: now, now+3h, now+6h, now+9h
- This is useful because I want to know how hot it will be this evening, for example
- Uses PirateWeather
two bus stops near my house and their departure/arrival times
- Uses the Portland-area transit Trimet Web Services API for arrival/departure times instead of GTFS
  - I had to do this because TriMet supports GTFS but not realtime GTFS
Art of some weather-related characters I like from Deltarune

I ended up putting it in a freestanding picture frame and just plugging it in, with the ESP device coming out the back and sitting right behind it:

Crucially, the device is plugged into a smart plug that I have configured to turn off between 11pm and 6am, which means the device is off 7 hours a day. I did this because I don’t have a motion sensor at home and the original code had some clever stuff that only refreshed the display when motion was detected (since the device is only good for a high-but-fixed number of refreshes). So I wrote an override setting the “motion detector” to just be a state variable that is always on. The manufacturer also recommends keeping the device unpowered from time to time, so having it plugged in to a smart plug that is off 7 hours a day kills two birds with one stone.

My code is all here:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/dariusk/25b4d73319d793981c9100a0e32831bf

configuration.yaml

# This  isn't my whole configuration.yaml, just the parts that I dropped into my existing
# configuration.yaml to get the dashboard working -Darius

# For Portland-area transit stuff, I use the Trimet developer API. You can get the API key ("appId") here: https://developer.trimet.org/appid/registration/
sensor:
  - platform: rest
    name: Trimet 20 E 0
    resource: "https://developer.trimet.org/ws/V2/arrivals?locIDs=813&appID=APP_DEV_KEY_GOES_HERE"
    scan_interval: 240
    method: GET

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dashboard.yaml

# WEATHERMAN DASHBOARD
# For Home Assistant and ESPHome
# Designed by Madelena Mak 2022 - https://mmak.es
# Modified by Darius Kazemi 2025

# Cue "Blame it on the Weatherman" by B*Witched!
esphome:
  name: "weatherman"
  on_boot:
      priority: 200.0

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I included inline comments all throughout, I hope it helps someone!