infoscreen

A tailored home information screen using a Raspberry Pi Zero WH, a 7.5" WaveShare e-Paper screen and HAT.

It's a bit like a magic mirror, but it's low power, not a mirror and contains code rather than magic.

I offer no warranty, support or help with this project.

It's just some scrappy code I wrote to do a thing. It might help you do a thing too, or it might not. Play with it and have fun.

I do assume you have some knowledge, such as how to setup a Raspberry Pi, how to clone git repos, get API keys and know some python.

I intend, one day, to make this easier to install, configure and use but this is not that day. I don't know Python all that well, so it's been a learning process too. I'm sure that there's plenty here that could be done better or in a more Pythonic way. If you'd like to suggest improvments then that would be nice.

Hardware requirements

• WaveShare 7.5 in black & white e-paper display + HAT
• Raspberry Pi (I used a ZeroW)

Installation requirements

Required:

• A newsapi.org account
• A National Rail API account
• An accuweather account

Optional:

• The Hive heating system

Setup instructions

1. Get the Raspberry Pi + setup, powered, network connected, accessible by SSH and with the e-paper screen connected.
2. SSH to your Raspberry Pi
3. Clone the code to the Raspberry Pi
4. Install some of the pre-requisite libraries:

pip install newsapi-python
pip install nre-darwin-py
pip install --upgrade requests-cache
pip install Pillow

5. Edit the apis.py file entering keys, usernames etc. for the services you are using. I'm using Hive for heating control, sunrise-sunset.org for getting sunrise/sunset times, Accuweather for weather data and Darwin for UK Train information.
6. For any service that you're not using, e.g. hive, you can comment out a section in display/display.py to hide that section.
7. Run the main.py script using python3 and, eventually once all the data has been gathered from the web services, the rendered image will be pushed to the e-paper screen. The data and image willbe refreshed every 5 minutes.
8. Using cron, and the 'launcher.sh' file in the repo, you can run the code headless. I hate cron. Took ages and some googling to get it to work. I can't remember how I did it now. :-(

Project structure

The project is split into the following areas:

• Root level folder containing the main.py file and some other important files, notably the epaper.py file which sends the image to the screen.
• data folder - Contains the code which talks to external webservices and gets data.
• display folder - Contains the folder which displays various viewable panels which are composed to form the image to be pushed to the e-paper screen. display.py co-ordinates the drawing process and draw.py does the actual drawing for each panel. settings.py contains lots of co-ordinates, font sizes and other things.
• fonts - a couple of Google fonts that the project uses.
• WeatherIcons - The weather icons, obviously.
• icons - Other icons!
• lib - The WaveShare e-paper drivers.

epaper.py

Commenting out the lines referencing epd7in5 and epd will allow the code to run without an e-paper screen connected. Very useful when you're playing around with what's to be displayed on a different platform (in my case Win10. Don't judge.).

Logging

A logfile will be produced in the root code directory and, when things go wrong, it might help diagnose the issue.