MagInkDash Gives You a Customizable, Long-Life, "Glanceable" ePaper Dashboard
With schedule, weather, and even ChatGPT-generated fact snippets, this open source dashboard packs in the features.
Pseudonymous maker "speedyg0nz" has built a successor to the MagInkCal project, designed to turn the ePaper calendar into a general-purpose and information-packed dashboard — and has released the source code as the MagInkDash.
"Back in September 2021, I shared about my E-Ink Calendar project (MagInkCal)," speedyg0nz explains, referring to their Android Magic Calendar-inspired ePaper frame project. "While the calendar has been serving me extremely well, I wanted a dashboard which offered additional information that was rich, timely and glanceable, such as the weather for the next hour just before leaving the house. While there were many projects that might achieve a similar outcome, I wanted something that met my specific needs. Hence, this project was born."
MagInkDash is a two-part project, with a Raspberry Pi acting as a server for content retrieval and image processing and an Inkplate 10 receiving the resulting imagery over a Wi-Fi connection courtesy of its integrated Espressif ESP32 microcontroller. "Using the [Raspberry Pi] as a server to generate/render content, and having a separate battery powered E-Ink display allows the display to have a much longer battery life," the maker explains. "On a 1,500mAh battery, the display can last 3-4 months on an hourly refresh cycle."
Where the original project was a mere calendar display, MagInkDash tries to pack in as much information as possible without sacrificing glanceability. In addition to putting the upcoming calendar events for the next three days at the right of the display, it also offers at-a-glance weather forecasting for the next hour and the next three days — and displays a randomized fact, courtesy of OpenAI's ChatGPT text-generation engine.
"OK, I'll admit that this is gimmicky," speedyg0nz admits of this latter feature. "I'm getting ChatGPT to generate random facts about animals, countries, historical figures, notable events, world records, etc. However, the kids at home love it! They'll stand in front of the dashboard and wait for it to refresh on the hour so they can read about the next fact!"
As with MagInkCal, speedyg0nz has released the full source code and usage instructions for MagInkDash on GitHub under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.