An e-ink display with fun and helpful information, just a glance away.
Glance is a picture frame-like e-ink tablet that is designed to display glance-able information thoughout the week.
It is made using a 7.5 inch e-ink display, rasberry pi 3b, pi sugar battery hat and a 3D printed casing.
It currently has 2 apps:
- InstructablesApp - Displays the current open contests on instructables.com
- AlbumApp - Displays a random image from a shared google photos album. Pictures can also be manually added
Check out the wiki for details on how to make one
In order to use glance, you will need to install the libraries for the e-ink screen and PiSugar battery. If using the same hardware as this project, follow the steps here:
-
Waveshare 7.5 inch e-ink screen - https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/7.5inch_e-Paper_HAT_Manual#Working_With_Raspberry_Pi
-
PiSugar Power Manager - https://github.com/PiSugar/PiSugar/wiki/PiSugar-Power-Manager-(Software)
Once this is done, you can go ahead and clone/download this repository.
After downloading the repository, navigate into the glance directory and run the following commands
pip install -r requirements.txt- Installs necessary packages to run glanceplaywright install- Installs required browsers for the InstructablesApp's webscraper
Note: If you get an error installing playwright, make sure your package list is up to date by running sudo apt update and try installing manually with pip install playwright. Once installed run playwright install to install the required browsers
There are several .conf files in the src directory. These are configuration files that can configure the way glance behaves
- glance.conf - This file contains the following configuration:
- page: determines which app (also called pages) to show. If you use the pi sugar battery you can set the custom button to cycle through the pages depending on what content you want to show. See wiki(comimng soon) for details
- has_pi_sugar: determines whether Glance is using the pi sugar battery and can display battery percentage in the different apps. If you're not using the battery update it to 'False'
- numofapps - This is the total number apps.
- preview_mode - Setting this to
Trueallows testing glance apps without an e-paper display or raspberry pi.
- album.conf - This is used for the Album app.
- url: Add a url to a shared google photos album. If you don't have/want to use google photos see setting below
- should_download: determines whether Glance downloads the album from google photos. If you don't want to download the album repeatedly, or if you don't want/use Google photos, set this value to False. You can instead manually put your photos in a folder called album and put it in the
AlbumApp/resfolder. - schedule_download: This allows you to schedule downloads on a specific day of the week. If you set to False, glance will download the photo album every time it's run (everyday)
- download_day: If schedule_download is true, you can set a day of the week you want to download the album.
python glance.py
The screen remains on even without power, so if you are using a battery you can shutdown you pi and the display will continue to show information. Of course this also means that it will not be able to update the information. If you use the pi sugar, you can have it start up at a specific time every day. Check out the wiki for details.
If you have app requests you could create an issue with the "App request" label and perhaps I might make it. Or if you would like to make your own apps for Glance, you can either fork this repo and create to your heart's content or pull this repo and create a pull request to have it added to this project 😀.
- The instructables contest app makes use of the Contest class created by James Matlock in his repo: https://github.com/jmatlock/ContestScraperFlask