Recently, I published the first part of my e-paper dashboard project, where I shared the story of its initial implementation and the evolution that led to its current form. My main goal was always to create a personal digital assistant that displays all the essential information I constantly need for my work and hobbies.
Because the 10.85-inch display is truly massive, my specific challenge was writing code that utilizes this huge canvas effectively, making the layout highly informative, efficient, and genuinely useful without looking cluttered.
In the previous article, I focused heavily on the hardware assembly and the custom 3D printed enclosure, providing only a basic script just to get the screen running.
In this short follow-up, I want to dive deeper into the software that makes this dashboard a truly smart daily companion.
Here is what it currently displays:- Bambu Lab Live Monitoring - Allows you to track your active 3D prints. It displays the current print status, completion percentage, remaining time, and current layer progress directly from your Bambu printer.
- Weather and Environment - Accurate 4-hour forecast, current temperature, humidity, UV index, and Air Quality (AQI) with visual alerts for high pollution levels.
- Strava Integration - Keeps an eye on your fitness journey by showing your total distance, yearly workout count, and a specific breakdown for cycling and hiking.
- Roborock Vacuum - Shows the current status, battery level, and dynamic progress of the cleaning session.
- Spotify - Displays the currently playing track, artist, and album cover.
- Gmail - A quick counter for your unread inbox emails.
I also implemented fallback scenarios. These are secondary widgets that automatically take the place of any primary widgets you might not use or decide to disable.
- System Monitor - Live Raspberry Pi load, including CPU percentage, free RAM, and performance sparklines.
- Crypto Ticker - Live BTC and ETH prices alongside 7-day trend graphs.
- Network Health - Live ping monitor to check your internet connection quality.
This is certainly not the final list of features I plan to add. It serves more as a starter pack that can be useful to a broad audience and acts as a demonstration of what this dashboard is truly capable of.
How it works:The beauty of this setup is that all the logic runs directly on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. Despite its small size, this board has plenty of resources to asynchronously fetch data from various APIs and render it smoothly on the large 10.85-inch screen.
Furthermore, since the Raspberry Pi operates within your local network, it easily communicates with local devices like your Bambu Lab 3D printer. If the printer is online, the dashboard connects to it and pulls real-time telemetry.
The best part is that you DO NOT need to switch your 3d printer to LAN-only mode for this to work. You get to see your live print status right in front of you while retaining full cloud functionality and the ability to use Bambu Studio as you normally would.
The code:I am incredibly excited to introduce the first public release of my dashboard code! You can now find the complete source code on my repository, where you will also find instructions for installing and configuring all the widgets.
In conclusion:Please feel free to leave your comments, suggestions, and criticisms. I appreciate all feedback and will continue working on this project, as I still have many ideas and believe this dashboard has huge potential.
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