This Gorgeous Minimalist ePaper Display Brings a Little Visual Flair to Your Volumio Setup
Designed around a high-resolution ePaper display driven by a Raspberry Pi Zero, this project is at once minimalist and eye-catching.
Maker Malcolm Splendiff has built a Raspberry Pi Zero-powered display system for the Volumio streaming service — opting to use an ePaper display for a minimalist, low-power finish: the Palamino.
"Volumio [is] an open source bit-perfect music server that runs on Linux," Splendiff explains. "This is about adding something we missed from the days of using the iPod: A good-looking, minimal, silent display that shows at a glance what's currently playing. To fill the gap we made one: It uses high definition ePaper and connects to the music server over Wi-Fi so that you can place it at the spot where you listen to music."
Designed for integration with an existing Volumio installation, the display is built around a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a Waveshare 6in high-resolution ePaper display. In Splendiff's case, both are then enclosed in a custom sheet-metal housing — purchasable from the VEEB website as the ePaper TickerXL — though this step is, naturally, optional.
"[The] screen monitors the Volumio server and displays what is currently playing," Splendiff explains: "The artwork and the metrics regarding the file format. We've made the code open source, and it's hosted on GitHub along with instructions on how to install it."
Those instructions, including a systemd service for auto-start, are available on Splendiff's GitHub repository along with the source code under the GNU General Public License 3.