HOME GAMES APPS CODE DESIGNS ELECTRONICS DOWNLOADS LEGACY

PI-POLYGNOTUS

GOAL

An epaper rendered dynamic painting display

CONCEPT

Needs to power on load a power and then turn off.

PURCHASES

Controller	Raspberry Pi Zero WH (with pre-soldered header) × 1	£15.12
SD Card	SanDisk Ultra 32GB microSDXC Memory Card	£14.99
E-Paper Display	Waveshare 13.3inch E Ink Spectra 6 (E6) Full Color E-Paper Display With HAT+ Standard Driver HAT, 1600x1200 Pixels, SPI Communication, E-Ink Display	£305.99
Servo controller	Angled 16-Channel Servo Driver HAT for Raspberry Pi (12-bit I2C)	£16.20

TOTAL		£352.3

IMPLEMENTATION

I accidentally snapped the HAT display when trying to open it stopping it working, but after contacting the amazing sales team they sent me a free replacement from China. So after looking at the demo I decided on extending the Python script. To keep things simple I started off with 31 paintings I really liked. My plan was to use the built in Raspbian Chron service to run the script nightly. This would then look at the day of the month and render that image for the day. I needed to get good quality images of the paintings and resize them to 1200 by 1600 24-bitmaps. Some of the paintings were landscape and some were portrait though so I decided to add a servo to turn the picture frame around to match the image. I would name the pictures "#_layout" so I could rotate to the correct setting and then load the correct image. So my favourite language to program in is DotNet so I looked originally at converting the Epaper example into C#. This had some problems as the script involved some image pallette manipulation. This was easy using System.Drawing.Imaging but this library isn't supported on Linux. Reluctantly I decided to use the script and pass it the image I needed after I had rotated the image. The next problem was the PI Zero wouldn't run dotnet.

MULTIMEDIA

View Video