A little while ago I ordered an Inkplate 10, which is a project pairing old Kindle E-Paper displays with ESP32 microcontrollers. Mine arrived a bit ago, and I’ve been looking for a good project to use it on.
Recently we’ve had some wildfires in the area that have significantly impacted air quality in our area. I have some air quality sensors here at the house, and all the data is logged, but I thought that this display would make a good way to present this data along with the time and some other data in the living room without having to check with my monitoring system.
The device was programmed using MicroPython, which connects to the wifi, pulls a json file from a local web server with all the data to present, and then handles all the drawing routines to display the info on the panel.
It was also interesting to experiment with partial refresh, which is a feature these E-Paper panels support. Partial refresh allows for updating only changed portions of the display without doing a full refresh of the panel. A full refresh involves some blinking between black and white and would be distracting every minute.