David Eisinger's Raspberry Pi-Powered ePaper Photo Frame Pulls Emailed Images From an S3 Bucket

Viget development director David Eisinger has has published a guide to building an ePaper photo frame powered by a Raspberry Pi — from the woodworking up.

"Over the winter I built and programmed a trio of ePaper picture frames for my family, and I thought it'd be cool to walk through the process in case someone out there wants to try something similar," Eisinger explains. "In short, it's a Raspberry Pi Zero connected to a roughly 5-by-7-inch ePaper screen, running some software I wrote in Go and living inside a frame I put together."

Built from 1x4 lumber with an acrylic front — "the tools I used were: A table saw, a miter saw, a drill press, a regular cordless drill (do not try to make the larger holes in the acrylic with a drill press omfg), an orbital sander, and some 12" clamps," Eisinger writes — the photo frame is designed to pull data from an AWS S3 bucket. Getting the photos into the bucket? It's as simple as emailing them.

"We use an array of AWS services to set up an email address that fires off a Lambda function when it receives an email," Eisinger explains. "The function extracts the attachments from the email, crops them a couple of ways (one for display on a webpage, the other for display on the screen), and uploads the results into an S3 bucket."

These photos are then accessed by a custom program written in Go, which is responsible for updating the ePaper display — a sunlight-readable electrophoretic panel which requires power only when it's changing between images. "Writing the main Go program was a lot of fun," says Eisinger. "I managed to do it all — interfacing with the screen, displaying a random photo, and serving up a web interface — in one (IMO) pretty clean file."

The full write-up, with links to the project's source code and a second post with detailed instructions on setting up the email-to-S3 gateway, can be found on the Viget website.