Follow

tech, tiny computer 

Now playing with e-ink displays. A few hours of soldering and staring at wiring charts later, I decided to be vain.

The goal of this experiment is to display some data graphs, but might as well have some fun with it first.

(Image credit Falvie, from a really long time ago.)

tech, tiny computer 

Update: it’s still running a few days later:

tech, tiny computer 

And we now have a solar-powered computer, tracking solar power and energy usage for the whole house.

tech, tiny computer 

For those interested in building their own, this is:
* One Raspberry Pi Zero W. I used the Vilros starter kit (~$35)
* One Waveshare 4.2 inch e-ink display ($10-40 depending on wholesale rates)
* One HI-S025 solar charger (~$40)

The thing is wireless and can do USB and HDMI too, which is just crazy.

tech, tiny computer 

(The Nordic Thingy is not part of the build, by the way. The entire computer is hidden under the solar panels, since it's about the size of a Tic Tac container once it had its tiny heatsink and GPIO pins installed.)

tech, tiny computer 

I used Cacti for graph generation, and the software was all FOSS as far as I'm aware.

tech, tiny computer 

“Siri, what does DST ending feel like to a computer?”

tech, tiny computer 

More experiments from the experiment table.

tech, tiny computer 

@Goldkin Ooh, spiffy! Now to replace the fonts with bitmaps. =:)

@Goldkin What exactly... happened? That seems a bigger spike than necessary for say, just writing extra input to the same hour...

@Taylor All of the old 1-2am information got written to the new 2am when clocks rolled back one hour, because that’s how this particular time series handled going back in time.

Sign in to participate in the conversation
Awoo Space

Awoo.space is a Mastodon instance where members can rely on a team of moderators to help resolve conflict, and limits federation with other instances using a specific access list to minimize abuse.

While mature content is allowed here, we strongly believe in being able to choose to engage with content on your own terms, so please make sure to put mature and potentially sensitive content behind the CW feature with enough description that people know what it's about.

Before signing up, please read our community guidelines. While it's a very broad swath of topics it covers, please do your best! We believe that as long as you're putting forth genuine effort to limit harm you might cause – even if you haven't read the document – you'll be okay!