A while ago, our little one was born. As unfortunately her (great-)grandparents are located somewhat spread out over the globe, real-life visits can’t happen too often. Obviously, video calling is a thing nowadays, so we keep in contact. Still, I wanted everyone to also be able to see her when we weren’t online together. So I thought: why not make a picture frame around a color display and a WiFi chip? Especially with the little one growing so fast, it would be nice to send a new photo every day and have it always show a new and up-to-date picture.
Most color e-ink displays are rather expensive still compared to black & white. Waveshare, a Chinese company catering to the maker market, has a line with the most common one is a 5.65 inch 7 color 640×448 unit. With only 7 colors and a refresh time of about a minute, it seems intended to be the ‘big brother’ to those price tags: displaying static information with the colors used to e.g. have some flat background colors. They’re certainly not intended to reproduce photorealistic images.
The project is built around an ESP32-C3 processor with WiFi. It can do deep sleep. Over the air updates were added to the firmware.
With only seven colors, getting a color picture to look correct is rather difficult. A whole page is used to describe how to get the best results.
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