Infowindow

Rapsberry pi powered e-ink display for displaying information in an always on state. There are several other iterations of this project online, but they didnt do quite what I wanted them to. This is my version. Also keeping up my python skills as they dont get used as much as they used to! Please be aware that this version is built for the v2 version of the e-ink screen!

The functionality is not meant to be an "end all solution for calendaring and Todo lists" The intent is to provide an always on display to show me what is coming up next. I can then check in browser, phone, etc for details and updates to the data. In your face reminder.

Features | Installation | Configuration | Running

Features

• Calendar
  • Google Calendar is the only calendar currently supported
• Todo List
  • Todoist
  • Teamwork.com
• Weather
  • Open Weather Map current data only. Future plan for forecast data.

Installation

Raspberry Pi setup

Activate SPI on your Raspberry Pi by using the raspi-config tool under Interface Options and reboot.

Also for some RaspiOS versions, you have to install the libopenjp2-7 package:

sudo apt-get install libopenjp2-7

Get software

Clone this repo onto your raspberry pi. Does not really matter where it is, but good option is in the pi users home directory: /home/pi/InfoWindow

Clone the e-Paper driver from waveshare

Waveshare sometimes changes things in their driver. So this part might need some changes, be aware!

git clone https://github.com/waveshareteam/e-Paper.git /home/pi/e-Paper
ln -s /home/pi/e-Paper/RaspberryPi_JetsonNano/python/lib/waveshare_epd/ /home/pi/InfoWindow/driver

Setup python modules

Run the following commands to install the requirements. I stuck to basic standard modules for ease of installation.

cd /home/pi/InfoWindow
export CFLAGS=-fcommon
sudo apt install python3-dev
python3 -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

You will need to configure a few things such as API Keys and location. Copy config.json-sample to config.json. Edit config.json to add your api keys and other information.

Optional: Increase lifetime of your SD-Card

If you want to increase the lifetime of the SD-Card, add the following line to /etc/fstab and reboot:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,nosuid,size=100m 0 0

With this line, the /tmp folder will be held in RAM and will not be written to the SD-Card.

Optional: Screen saver

Always displaying the same colors at the same spots might have some negative effect on your E-Ink screen. To remedy this, there is a simple additional script, which displays all three colors on the whole screen: I recommend to let this run once every night, i.e. at 1 minute past 5 with:

• Run crontab -e
• insert 1 5 * * * /home/pi/InfoWindow/venv/bin/python3 /home/pi/InfoWindow/screensaver.py > /dev/null 2>&1

General

• rotation: 0 - This is the rotation of the display in degrees. Leave at zero if you use it as a desktop display. Change to 180 if you have it mounted and hanging from a shelf.
• timeformat: 12h / 24h

Todo (Module)

Todoist is the current active module in this code. It only requires api_key. Teamwork also requires a 'site' key. If using google tasks, leave this as null todo: null

• api_key: Enter your todoist API key.

There is a bug in the Google API which will prevent to show repeated Tasks once one is marked as completed. See (and upvote):

• https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/3706294
• https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/4113489
• https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/111623199
• https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/113398139

Weather (Module)

Open Weather Map is where the data is coming from in the default module. This requires a few keys.

• api_key: Get your api key from OWM website.
• city: Look at OWM docs to figure what your city name is. Mine is "Sacramento,US"
• units: This can either be imperial or metric

Google calendar and ToDo list (Modules)

To use the google APIs, you first have to login to the google cloud console. In the google cloud console, do the following things:

1. Create a project and give it a name, i.e. infowindow and switch to the context of this project if not already active.
2. Create a new oauth consent screen (just enter a name should be enough).
3. Create a new oauth 2.0 client id. Choosing type other should work just fine. Finally, download the json file provided by the google cloud console and store it in the repo directory (i.e. /home/pi/InfoWindow/google_secret.json) on the Raspberry Pi.

Calendar

There are are additional sections in the config for this module:

• additional: A list of additional calendar names (summary) to fetch. To use i.e. birthdays, add "Contacts" (also if you use google in german.
• ignored: A list of events to be removed from the calendar display.

Running

First Run

You should run the script manually the first time so that Googles auth modules can run interactivly. Once that has completed you will want to add this to CRON so it runs every few minutes automatically.

Cron Run (Normal use)

• Run crontab -e
• insert */6 * * * * /home/pi/InfoWindow/venv/bin/python3 /home/pi/InfoWindow/infowindow.py --cron > /dev/null 2>&1