A Handy Breakout Board For E-Paper Hacking

June 15, 2022 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

If you follow the exploits of [Aaron Christophel] (and trust us, you should), you’ll know that for some time now he’s been rather obsessed with electronic price tags, specifically those with e-paper displays. It’s certainly not hard to see why — these low-power devices are perfect for ambient displays, and their integrated wireless capabilities mean you can put one in every room and update them from a central transmitter.

But with such a wide array of products on the market, [Aaron] has found himself doing a lot of e-paper reverse engineering. This involves sticking a logic analyzer between the display and the tag’s microcontroller, which he found to be a rather finicky task. That’s why he created the Universal E-Paper Sniffer: a breakout PCB that lets you snoop on display communication without having to resort to unpleasant methods like scratching off the solder mask to tap into the traces by hand.

It’s a pretty simple gadget: on either side, you’ve got a connector for 24 pin 0.5 mm pitch flat flex cable, which [Aaron] has identified as the most common interface for these displays, and in the middle you’ve got a standard 2.54 mm pitch header. There are no other components on the board, and all the traces go right through to the other side.

Add a few jumpers and a cheap logic analyzer, and you’re ready to sniff some SPI commands. Check out the video after the break for a general walk-through of what it looks like to start sniffing around a new display.

The Gerber files for the breakout are available for free, or you can chose to buy a fabricated board through PCBWay to kick [Aaron] a portion of the sale price. However you get one, we think this will be a handy little tool to have around if you find yourself bitten by the price tag hacking bug.

Continue reading “A Handy Breakout Board For E-Paper Hacking” →

A wooden picture frame with an e-ink display

Receive Virtual Postcards On This Beautiful E-Ink Photo Frame

May 22, 2022 by Robin Kearey 12 Comments

Sending postcards to loved ones used to be standard procedure for travelers back when travel was glamorous and communications were slow. While some travelers still keep this tradition alive, many have replaced stamps and post offices with instant messaging and social media — faster and more convenient, but a lot less special than receiving a postcard with a handwritten message from a faraway land.

[Cameron] designed a postcard picture frame that aims to bring back a bit of that magic. It’s a wooden frame that holds an e-ink display, which shows pictures sent to it by your friends. All they need to do is open the unique link that you sent them beforehand and upload an interesting photo; the picture frame will cycle through the submissions based on an adjustable schedule. A web interface allows you to change settings and delete any inappropriate images.

The wooden frame is beautifully made, but the sleek black PCB inside is an true work of art. It holds a battery and a USB-C charging circuit, as well as an ESP32 that connects to WiFi, stores images and downscales them to the 800×480 monochrome format used by the display. [Cameron] has not accurately measured the current consumption, but estimates that it should work for about one year on a single charge thanks to the extremely low power requirements of e-ink displays.

Having your friends decide on the images shown in your house is an interesting idea, if you can trust them to keep it decent. If you like to have more control over your e-ink display, have a look at this solar-powered model or this wall-mounted newspaper display.

Continue reading “Receive Virtual Postcards On This Beautiful E-Ink Photo Frame” →

E-Paper Clock Displays Things In A Battery-Friendly Manner

May 15, 2022 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

Clock builds are a hacker staple, and many overflow with power-thirsty LEDs and network features. This build from [mattwach] takes quite the opposite approach, sipping away at its batteries thanks to an e-paper based design.

The build relies on a small Waveshare e-paper module which only requires power when the display is actually changing. When static, the display needs no electricity, and this helps save a great amount of power compared to OLED or LCD-based clocks.

An Atmega328p is the heart of the build, running off a 32.768 KHz clock crystal for a combination of precise timekeeping and low power draw. Time is ensured to be both precise and accurate thanks to a GPS module which allows the clock to sync to satellite time when powered up. It’s a common way to sync clocks to a high-quality time source. Most of the time, though, the GPS is kept powered down to save the 30-100 mA that the module typically draws when in use.

Other features include a temperature, humidity, and pressure sensor, with ambient pressure graphed over time. There’s also notification of sunrise and sunset times, along with the current phase of the moon. It’s all wrapped up in a case tastefully manufactured using 3D printed parts and some wooden CNC-cut panels for a nice rustic look.

With the e-paper display and the microcontroller configured for low-power operation, the clock will run for around 6 months on four AAA cells. Overall, it’s a nifty little clock that will provide the time, date, and other information without the need for an Internet connection. Video after the break.

Continue reading “E-Paper Clock Displays Things In A Battery-Friendly Manner” →

That Clock On The Wall Is Actually A Network Ping Display

February 9, 2022 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

We’ve all been online from home a bit more than usual lately, in ways that often stretch the limits of what our ISP can muster. You know the signs — audio that drops out, video sessions that make you look like [Max Headroom], and during the off-hours, getting owned in CS:GO by pretty much everyone. All the bandwidth in the world won’t make up for high latency, and knowing where you stand on that score is the point of this ping-tracking clock.

This eye-catching lag-o-meter is courtesy of [Charl], who started the build with a clock from IKEA. Stripped of pretty much everything but the bezel, he added a coaxial clock motor and a driver board, along with a custom-printed faceplate with logarithmic scale. The motors are driven by an ESP32, which uses internet control message protocol (ICMP) to ping a trusted server via WiFi, calculates the proper angles for the hands, and drives the motors to show you the bad news. There’s also an e-paper display in the face, showing current server and WiFi settings.

We really like how this clock looks, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the numbers it displays would often be too depressing to bear, we’d build one in a snap. If facing the painful truth isn’t your style, there are other neat ICMP tricks that you can try instead.

An animated newspaper image from Harry Potter

Muggle Uses E-Paper For Daily Prophet Replica

October 29, 2021 by Chris Wilkinson 12 Comments

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.

Continue reading “Muggle Uses E-Paper For Daily Prophet Replica” →

See The Unseen With This Magnetic Field Visualizer

September 1, 2021 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

The average Hackaday reader likely knows, at least in the academic sense, what a magnetic field looks like. But as the gelatinous orbs in our skull can perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum, we have to take those textbook diagrams at face value. That is, unless you’ve got one of these nifty magnetic field visualizers developed by [Dr.Stone].

Using an XMC1100 microcontroller development board and a TLV49 3D magnetic sensor, the device is able to track the poles of a magnet in real-time and produce an approximation of what the field lines would look like on its electronic paper display. Relative field strength is indicated by the size of the visualization, which allows the user to easily compare multiple magnets. Incidentally, [Dr.Stone] notes that the current version of the hardware and software can only handle one magnet at a time; visualizing complex magnetic fields and more than two poles would take an array of sensors and likely a more powerful processor.

Do you need to visualize the field lines around a magnet? Perhaps not. But being able to quickly get an idea of how strong a magnet is and identify where its poles are could certainly come in handy. We’d like to see [Dr.Stone] take the project to the next phase and turn this into a handheld device for convenient workbench use. It would be a lot less messy than some of the previous methods we’ve seen for visualizing magnetic fields, though if you’re only worried about field strength, there’s arguably more straightforward ways to display it.

Continue reading “See The Unseen With This Magnetic Field Visualizer” →

Inkplate Comes Full Circle, Becomes True Open Reader

August 20, 2021 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

Regular readers will likely remember the Inkplate, an open hardware electronic paper development board that combines an ESP32 with a recycled Kindle screen. With meticulous documentation and full-featured support libraries for both the Arduino IDE and MicroPython, the Inkplate makes it exceptionally easy for hackers and makers to write their own code for the high-quality epaper display.

Now, thanks to the efforts of [Guy Turcotte], the Inkplate family of devices can now boast a feature-rich and fully open source ereader firmware. The project started in October of last year, and since then, the codebase has been steadily updated and refined. Nearing its 1.3 release, EPub-InkPlate has most of the functions you’d expect from a modern ereader, and several that might take you by surprise.

For one thing, [Guy] has taken full advantage of the ESP32 microcontroller at the heart of the Inkplate and implemented a web server that lets you manage the reader’s library from your browser. This allows books in EPUB v2 and v3 formats to be uploaded and saved on the Inkplate’s SD card without any special software. There’s currently support for JPG, PNG, BMP, and GIF images, as well as embedded TTF and OTF fonts.

As of this writing EPub-InkPlate supports both the six and ten inch Inkplate variants, and uses the touch pads on the side of the screen for navigation. While it’s on the wishlist for the final 1.3 release, the project currently doesn’t support the Inkplate 6PLUS; which uses the backlit and touch compatible displays pulled from Kindle Paperwhites. With shipments the new 6PLUS model reportedly going out in November, hopefully it won’t be long before its enhanced features are supported.

With the rising popularity of ebooks, it’s more important than ever that we have open hardware and software readers that work on our terms. While they may never compete with the Kindle in terms of units sold, we’re eager to see projects like EPub-InkPlate and the Open Book from [Joey Castillo] mature to the point that they’re a valid option for mainstream users who don’t want to live under Amazon’s thumb.

Continue reading “Inkplate Comes Full Circle, Becomes True Open Reader” →