I build a digital picture frame using an 8-color e-ink display and a pi pico.
It works great within its limitations, but the limitations are still pretty big
8 colors is pretty limited, especially when it’s a specific 8 colors (not just 8 max).
Refresh times are slow
The pico memory and storage are limited
Due to the above, mine ran in two cycles with a reboot between to clear memory. One to pull images from my website and another to cycle through existing pictures until it needs to grab more
Images needed to be converted to the appropriate size+ 8-color palette and dithered etc beforehand into a format the pico can read (hence then being on my website where they were reduced to an uncompressed palletized BMP)
Obviously a commercial product could probably do better, or a better screen, but faster-refresh or higher-color tends to jump in price quickly.
Still, it was pretty cool to have a device that would not need power to persist images, and used only a little during the process of loading new ones so could be powered by battery/solar
I’ve thought of doing something similar, the other fun part is that you could stash a big battery behind the display and run the E-ink on a super slow refresh rate since they only use power to refresh. I wish E-ink wasn’t so ridiculously expensive. This monitor would be perfect if it weren’t $1200.
I build a digital picture frame using an 8-color e-ink display and a pi pico.
It works great within its limitations, but the limitations are still pretty big
Obviously a commercial product could probably do better, or a better screen, but faster-refresh or higher-color tends to jump in price quickly.
Still, it was pretty cool to have a device that would not need power to persist images, and used only a little during the process of loading new ones so could be powered by battery/solar
I’ve thought of doing something similar, the other fun part is that you could stash a big battery behind the display and run the E-ink on a super slow refresh rate since they only use power to refresh. I wish E-ink wasn’t so ridiculously expensive. This monitor would be perfect if it weren’t $1200.
This is the one I got. It’s not terribly expensive but yeah it does have limitations in terms of colors and refresh times