Carlo Grisafi has a great idea for a DIY gift. This year many of us won’t be able to be with our loved ones for the holidays. How about a gift that allows us to display messages from friends and family as the come in? Here’s the project from Carlo Grisafi via hackster.io:
Given the current global situation, seeing each other has been particularly difficult and ensuring that we are and remain in good spirit has become more important than ever. For these reasons, I have decided to make a “smart” messaging device to keep my family more connected and ensure we can check on each other during these difficult times. The base for this project is the InkyShot from Balena, which allows me to easily connect the Raspberry Pi with the e-ink display to the cloud and flash it remotely to deliver quotes. Building on this idea, I can use the Balena Python SDK to create a script that connects to the Balena Cloud and updates the device environment variables to update the message on the device. Finally, I can wrap this up in a nice interface to allow my less tech-savvy family members to be able to update the messages through a GUI.
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