“This is a E-ink dashboard that provides real-time information pulled from API using a Raspberry Pi Zero.
I’ve always been interested in projects that provide you real-time information from selected sources, seeing people doing smart mirror projects made me want to do one for myself, one of the biggest reasons that I ended up doing this project was to help my partner in life in her mornings, she uses transit to go to work and this dashboard would provide her information of coming buses to our closest stops and what the current weather would be at the moment.
I opted to use an e-paper display instead of an LCD due low power consumption, I’ve seen a lot of projects that provide you things like the weather, calendars or a task list that use a normal raspberry pi, I wanted something that could be hanged in the wall and possibly hidden within the frame, the raspberry pi zero w was a pretty good option.
I had some knowledge of python from my work but still wanted to improve and learn more, this project helped me improve greatly on it, reading the instructions from the e-paper hat and seeing how other projects worked they provided me a great example.
The way it works its pretty simple, you register on the site where you want to pull the information for an API key, then using the requests library to provide you a JSON list, once you have the information you are looking for you only need to format it to your liking, render it into a PNG with the PIL library and send it to the e-paper display.
The first version I created, got the modules for transit (4 stops with 2 times each), the weather (current and 2 days forecast) and regular monthly calendar.”