Main Content

E-Ink Tide and Weather Tracker

Tracking the tides and weather at your favorite beach.

My parents recently got a place on the water and have been obsessed with looking up the tides everyday so I decided to build them a custom TideTracker. The idea is to present the predicted high and low times for the day and a plot showing the tide over the last 24 hours. In addition to that I added some basic weather data to give them info at a glance.

This project uses a Raspberry Pi for the brains and an E-Ink display for the information. When researching the project initially I found a similar project by Luke Haas that I used to test the display’s functionality before writing my own program, check that project out here.

E-Ink Display
For this project I wanted to use an e-ink display for a few reasons. The first being that they are low energy; once the screen has been written to the image on screen will remain even when power is removed which means the device can enter a sleep mode without needing to power the display. Secondly this is going to located likely in a very sunny place and there’s no need to worry about brightness or glare on e-ink screens. And lastly because I think they’re cool and I haven’t had the chance to use them in any of my projects yet.

This project uses the WaveShare 7.5 Inch Display and HAT for the Raspberry Pi. There are a number of different versions of this display but I’m using the basic 800x480 black and white.”

Link to article