infodisplay

My display, using a Raspberry Pi Zero W and Waveshare 6" e-paper hat.

Modular information display framework aimed at e-ink devices.

Built using Python 3.7 and pillow. Works out of the box with IT8951-powered e-paper displays.

Setting up

• When using an e-paper display with IT8951 controller, install GregDMeyer's IT8951 library following the instructions there.
• Install the Roboto font family (fonts-roboto from the package manager) to make text look nice.
• Clone this repository and cd to its folder.
• Install the basic required packages using pip:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

• Install the optional packages:
• (If you plan to use the google calendar integration, or a widget with plots)

pip3 install -r optional-requirements.txt

Note for Raspberry Pi users: you may have to install numpy and matplotlib from the raspbian package manager.

• Copy the example config file:

cp config.ini.example config.ini

• Make your changes to config.ini using your favourite editor.

You should now be able to run the info display using something like python3 run.py.

FontAwesome icons

The class in fontawesome.py lets you use FontAwesome icons. These are used in the Calendar widget by default.

To see the icons, download a set of FontAwesome svg's (e.g. from here) and unzip the regular, solid, and brands folders into the fa/ folder:

wget https://use.fontawesome.com/releases/v5.15.4/fontawesome-free-5.15.4-desktop.zip
unzip fontawesome-free-5.15.4-desktop.zip
mv fontawesome-free-5.15.4-desktop/svgs/* fa/

Running as a service

A sample systemd unit file is provided in infodisplay.service. This is set up so the service only starts after an NTP time sync is established. Raspberry Pi's don't have a hardware RTC, so system time can be wildly inaccurate until they get the network time.

• Edit infodisplay.service to reflect where you cloned the repository to, and what user it should run as. (default: /home/pi/infodisplay and pi)
• Enable the systemd time-sync.target:

sudo systemctl enable systemd-time-wait-sync

• Copy your unit file:

sudo cp infodisplay.service /etc/systemd/system/

• Reload systemd:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

• Enable autostart of the service:

sudo systemctl enable infodisplay.service

• Finally, start the service:

sudo systemctl start infodisplay.service

Google Calendar integration

To get events from your Google Calendar you need a Google Cloud Platform project, OAuth credentials and finally a token. Follow the 'Prerequisites' section of this tutorial and you should have a credentials.json file at the end.

The following needs to be done on your desktop computer, as a dialog will pop up for authorization:

• Clone this repo.
• Install the optional requirements using pip3 install -r optional-requirements.txt.
• Copy your credentials.json to the util folder.
• cd to the util folder.
• Run python3 get-google-calendars.py.

This script should give you the ID's of the calendars synced to your account. Pick the ones you want and add them to the config.ini. There should now also be a token.json file in the directory, copy this to your main infodisplay folder.

Structure

Have a look through the example config file. This has one main section with global configuration parameters, all other sections are specific to widgets.

The display is divided into a grid, where each widget is given a canvas spanning one or more grid cells. The scheduler calls each widget to update their canvas, pastes updated widgets onto the global canvas, and triggers a display update at the right time.

The most basic example of a widget is given in Dummy.py. Widgets are automatically loaded if their name exists as a section in your config.ini. These sections should have names matching files in the widgets/ folder with corresponding widget classes that go by the same name (e.g. there is a 'Dummy' section in config.ini and widgets/Dummy.py has a class named Dummy).

Looking to add support for your own type of (e-ink) display? You should only have to modify display.py. Keep in mind that the default canvas is of image mode L, or 8-bit greyscale. You will have to modify this to suit your display.

Notes

In due time this information should be moved to the wiki section and expanded.