A wall mounted picture frame with an e-ink newspaper displayed.

A Wall Mounted Newspaper That’s Extra

E-Ink displays are becoming more ubiquitous and with their low power draw, high contrast and hackability, we see many projects use them in framed wall art, informational readouts and newspaper displays. [Sho] uses this idea to create a wall mounted newspaper packed full of features.

The back of a picture frame with the electronics for an e-ink newspaper display.

[Sho] describes using a 13.3 inch ED133UT2 1600×1200 E-Ink display with an ITE IT8951 electronic paper display (EPD) driver, controlled by an ESP32. An RV-3028-C7 real time clock (RTC) is used to keep time and to wake up the ESP32 and other devices for daily refreshes. A 3.7V 1100mAh LiPo battery provides power through an MT3608 boost converter module to provide the 5V needed, with the E-Ink display driver further isolated from the power behind a KY-019 5V relay module to avoid unnecessary power draw when not needed.

The backend software uses the OpenWeatherMap API to get daily weather reports and scrapes news websites which are then fed through an OpenAI ChatGPT API to provide summaries. [Sho] reports that text is formatted using a combination of LuaTeX, Ghostscript, ImageMagick and other scripts to format the eventual displayed graphics, including newspaper texture and randomely placed coffee stain effects.

Be sure to check out [Sho]’s project page for some more details. E-Ink displays are still a bit pricey but the effect is hard to beat and they make great options for projects like infinite generative landscapes or low power weather stations.

Commodore 64 Reports The News

In the late 80s and into the 90s, [Cameron Kaiser] aka [ClassicHasClass] was an aspiring journalist, first becoming interested in the career in elementary school and then working on various publications into university. At some point, he started using a piece of software for laying out newspapers called The Newsroom which, he admits, was lacking a lot of tools that would have been modern even for the time, but had an otherwise agreeable price tag thanks to its focus more on home desktop publishing and newsletter production than on full-scale newspaper operations. It did have one interesting feature that he never could figure out, though, at least until he went back and pieced this mystery together.

The software itself ran on the Apple II and was eventually ported to other systems of the era, including the Commodore 64. The mystery feature was known as “Wire Service” and appeared to be a way that users of the software who had a modem could connect with one another and share news releases, layouts, graphics, and other content created in Newsroom, but in the days where it would have been modern never was able to connect to anything. In fact, it was eventually abandoned by the developers themselves in later releases of the software. But [ClassicHasClass] was determined to get it working. Continue reading “Commodore 64 Reports The News”

An animated newspaper image from Harry Potter

Muggle Uses E-Paper For Daily Prophet Replica

News from the wizarding world is a little hard to come by for common muggles, but [Deep Tronix] has brought us one step closer to our magical counterparts with their electronic replica of the Daily Prophet newspaper.

Those familiar with the Harry Potter series will no doubt be familiar with the Daily Prophet. In the films, the newspaper is especially eye-catching with its spooky animated images, a reflection of the magic present throughout the wizarding world. This was achieved with post-production special effects for the films, but this fan-made front page of the Prophet brings the concept to life using e-paper technology and a few other interesting gadgets, all hidden away in a picture frame.

As mentioned, the heart of this project is the e-paper display and a Teensy microcontroller. While e-paper displays are excellent for displaying static text and simple graphics, they are usually not suitable for moving images due to suffering from a form of ‘burn in’, which can leave errant pixels on the screen. This means that e-paper technology typically has a relatively low frame rate for video. [Deep Tronix] has used a custom dithering library to somewhat mitigate this issue, and the results are impressive. Moving images are loaded from an external SD card, processed, and then displayed on the e-paper display, which is almost indistinguishable from the newspaper print that surrounds it.

The seemingly magical newspaper also has a face detection feature, which is enabled by a hidden camera and the venerable ESP32 microcontroller. This system integrates with the Teensy to record and then display the reader’s face on the e-paper display. A neat trick, which is made all the more eerie when these faces are later displayed at random.

We’ve seen Daily Prophet replicas before using more traditional display technology, however the move to an e-paper display goes a long way to improving the overall aesthetics, despite the lower frame rates. With Halloween just around the corner, you might just end up tricking a few people with this clever prop – check out all the build details here.

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A Fresh E-Ink Newspaper Delivered Every Morning

[Greg Raiz] recently set out to make it easy to read multiple newspapers in the morning over breakfast. Inspired by a similar project, he built an e-ink newspaper that hangs on his wall, delivering fresh news every ten minutes.

The project started with a 32″ Visionect e-ink display configured as a thin client. With a battery life measured in months thanks to the low power electronics, most of the work here was focused on the backend. A docker container running on a local NAS server collects newspapers via freedomforum.org, formats them to fit the aspect ratio of the display, and serves them up. [Greg] is really trying to preserve the design and thought that goes into the front page of each of these publications as traditional newspaper layouts are often designed by hand.

We love the simplicity and the “it-just-works” feel of this project as there are no buttons, wires, or anything that you need to fiddle with. [Greg] points out that it could also be used for other purposes, and we’d love to see a large calendar such as this e-ink calendar or perhaps even a 32″ version of this e-ink laptop. The code for this is on his GitHub with a video after the break.

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Printed Separator Separates Printed Pages

We all know people trapped in aging bodies who can’t do all the things they used to do. It’s easy to accept that you may never move small furniture around by yourself again, but losing the ability to do something as simple as separating the pages of your newspaper to keep reading it is an end to enjoyment.

When [Randomcitizen4] visited his grandma over the holidays, she mentioned having trouble with this, among other things. He fired up his printer and got to work designing a device to help her get back to the funny pages. This simple gripper mechanism uses rubber bands for tension and flexible filament to get a firm grip on the paper. The jaws default to the open position so they’re ready to grab some newsprint, and a light squeeze of the handles slides the top page back from the stack, creating a gap for Grandma’s fingers. You can see a demo on page 32 after the break.

Although the device does work on some books and magazines, he’d like to improve the design of the grips to make the device more universally useful. [Randomcitizen4] says he tried a few things already, but we wonder if a more complex surface pattern might do the trick — maybe less like fins and more like a tire tread pattern. All the STLs are available if you want to give it a go.

If Grandma’s newspaper ever goes out of print, she should still be able to read it on a tablet or an e-reader. Then maybe [Randomcitizen4] can build some kind of remote-controlled page turner for her.

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Rocket Propellant Manufactured From Old Newspaper

It turns out that old newsprint can be a bit explosive; at least when it’s combined with the proper ingredients. [Markus Bindhammer] worked out a way to make solid rocket propellant from newspaper. Judging from the test footage after the break the home made engines work great!

There isn’t a long list of ingredients. In addition to newspaper you’ll need some potassium chlorate (KClO3) which serves as an oxidizer, white wood glue, and PVC pipe. The KClO3 is ground with a mortar and pestle, then run through a sieve before being combined with the wood glue. This combination is painted on the newspaper which is then rolled up with a glass rod at the center. This is allowed to harden before going into the PVC. The excess is trimmed and the whole thing is baked in a convection oven at 105 C for two hours.

If this process doesn’t suit you maybe cooking up a batch of sugar-based propellant is worth a try?

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Audio Ads In Newspapers?

Oh no, lets hope this little gimmick doesn’t catch on. Volkswagen has put out an advertisement in an Indian newspaper that plays an audio file when you unfold the paper. This appears to work much like those greeting cards that play a song when you open them. There’s a sensor that detects the newspaper opening, probably just a piece of plastic or paper that slides out from between two contacts. This allows power to the circuit and the audio file is played.  Can you imagine how obnoxious this could be? Especially if your newspaper was riddled with these and those E-paper screens.  Then again, that speaker looks like massive overkill for this kind of thing and might be a decent piece electronics to keep in the reuse bin. You can see a video of the newspaper after the break.

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