A brown, wooden picture frame with a white matte holds a slightly pixelated photo of gaming miniatures. It is sitting on a wooden table.

A Colorful Take On The E-Ink Photo Frame

Everyone loves sharing photos, and with most pictures being taken on smartphones now, digital frames are more convenient than finding a photo printer. [Wolfgang Ziegler] used an e-ink screen to create a colorful digital picture frame.

Starting with a seven color e-ink HAT he’d forgotten he had, a spare Pi Zero, and analog photo frame, he pieced the parts together into a pretty slick, sunlight readable photo frame. [Ziegler] details how he set up the frame to display new images using the Pimoroni inky library. He set a fifteen minute refresh interval since the color e-ink display takes 30 seconds to refresh to keep it from looking weird too often.

With the holidays coming up, this might make a perfect gift for family that wants to see the latest from your travels without blasting it to the whole internet. We’ve covered a few different options from a lightweight ESP8266 build, to this one that can rotate, and even issues with some of the commercial options.

Introducing Hat A Day! Not To Be Confused With The Real HaD Of Course…

Hat a Day

With the release of the Raspberry Pi B+ model comes a whole slew of extra GPIO connectors, a whopping 40 of them in fact — Almost double the original B model! A HAT stands for Hardware Attached on Top, and Adafruit is celebrating by trying to create a new hat, every day.

A HAT is a rectangular board measuring 65x56mm with mounting holes for the Raspberry Pi B+ and a 40 pin GPIO header. That doesn’t sound too special by itself, but two of the header pins are reserved for a special auto-configuration system that allows your Pi to have automatic GPIO and driver setup! Now we’re talking!

So far Adafruit has made a handful of prototype HATs including the Perma-proto HAT, a GPS HAT, a TFT HAT, an Arcade HAT and even a Servo HAT. But they’re looking for more! We think they’ve slipped up on the one a day record though…

We’re excited to see more integrated projects with the B+ since it’s so much more friendly for add-on hardware than the original — What kind of hardware would you like to see in HAT form? Do you like the idea of HATs?