Mepaper Brings the Internet of Memes to E Ink Displays on the Desks of Co-Workers

Meme + ePaper = mepaper!

James Lewis
1 year agoInternet of Things

Working remotely at an IoT tech company feels less remote when you can share memes with your co-workers. Golioth's developer relations engineer, Mike Szczys, took that sharing one step further with an E Ink Wi-Fi display project called mepaper that shares memes with co-workers in one-bit color.

When employees join Golioth, they receive an Adafruit MagTag. MagTag is an ESP32-S2-based board with a 296 x 128 pixel monochrome E Ink display. It also has four RGB NeoPixels, four pushbuttons, and an accelerometer. The low-power display, blinky LEDs, triple-axis sensor, and Wi-Fi combination make it an ideal demo device for an IoT platform company!

Szczys used the MagTag to share memes with co-workers. The ESP32 runs firmware based on the ESP-IDF that connects to the Internet to download images. It then shows them on the E Ink display. Golioth's own services manage the fleet of MagTags. The project mixes embedded microcontroller code, Python, Google Drive, Slack, and Golioth.io.

Golioth is an IoT platform that provides cloud services for embedded devices. In short, they simplify the messy middle of connecting a microcontroller to the Internet by providing device-level services like messaging, security, and over-the-air (OTA) updates.

Currently, each user must set up their device's credentials. This inconvenience is one area that Szczys hopes to address in a future update. To learn more about the embedded software behind this project, check out this Golioth blog post.

James Lewis
Fan of making things that blink, fly, or beep. Host on element14 Presents, baldengineer.com, AddOhms, and KN6FGY.
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