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This is a forked project of waveshare-clock that only displayed clock and weather and supported only Waveshare 4.2inch B&W displays. This project enhances the original project to support Waveshare 2.7inch displays with red dye (BWR) and adds the following additional features:

• gauges for current traffic drive times for two configured destinations (thanks to Google Maps API)
• gauge for air quality index (AQI) of home location (thanks to Airly.eu API)
• weather gauge may display:
  • alerts issued by governmental authorities - it works for the EU, US & Canada (thanks to DarkSky.net API)
  • warning about storms in defined vicinity (thanks to DarkSky.net API)
• buttons support to display detailed information about: weather, air quality, traffic and system information (on supported devices, i.e. 2.7inch HUT with switches)
• font with relaxed license already included in the project

For both new gauges one may configure warning levels - in such a case the particular gauge becomes red (on supported devices, i.e. 2.7inch BWR).

More photos of the assembled e-paper 2.7inch display sitting on top of Raspberry Pi zero enclosed in a custom-built LEGO™ housing and running this project are here.

BTW, these LEGO bricks are almost 30 years old (!)

• Raspberry Pi Zero or similar
• e-paper display 2.7inch HUT or e-paper display 4.2inch B&W display with SPI
• 8-16GB SD card

• install Raspbian on SD card using this instruction
• enable and configure WiFi before you start the system - more here
• find the IP of RPi by scanning your local network or take a look at your router to find a new device connected to your network
• SSH to your raspberry: ssh [email protected]
• python 2.7 should be already present, you may want to verify this by running: python --version
• install git: sudo apt install git
• issue the command to fetch this project: git clone https://github.com/pskowronek/epaper-clock-and-more.git
• go to the project directory: cd epaper-clock-and-more and install required python modules: pip install -r requirements.txt
• rename run-EDIT-ME.sh to run.sh and edit run.sh to configure:
  • your home location (lon & lat)
  • two destinations to check traffic delays
  • a key for traffic information from Google Maps - you can get it here *)
  • a key for weather forecast from DarkSky.net - you can get it here *)
  • a key for Air Quality Index data from Airly.eu - you can get it here *)
  • type of e-paper device, whether it is 2.7 or 4.2 (by default it is pre-configured for 2.7" BWR)
• run the script: ./run.sh (hit Ctrl-C to exit) and verify if it works as expected
• install this project as a service so it could automatically run when Raspberry boots up (more details here)
  • copy epaper.service to /etc/systemd/system: sudo cp epaper.service /etc/systemd/system/ **)
  • verify if service works by invoking the following command: sudo systemctl start epaper.service
  • enable this script so it could be run on system start: sudo systemctl enable epaper.service
  • reboot device to verify if it works
  • if you needed to modify epaper.service issue this command: sudo systemctl daemon-reload
  • logs can be observed in /var/log/syslog: sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog | grep run.sh

*) By default data are being fetched every 10+ minutes so they should comply with developer free accounts limitations

**) If your project directory is different than /home/pi/epaper-clock-and-more then you must edit this file to reflect the correct path

Since the original project supported 4.2inch B&W displays only, the code has been modified to support also 2.7inch B+W+R displays. This has been done by adding a second red canvas and down-sizing the black and red canvases to smaller resolutions as required by 2.7inch displays.

E-paper 2.7inch by Waveshare does not support partial refresh and every modification of displayed data requires full refresh which takes around 5s meantime flickering a lot.

You may try to turn on experimental feature to make display refresh much faster (10x quicker for black dye, 2-3 times quicker for red dye). This has been achieved by modification of LUT tables of original epd2in7b.py Waveshare library. The LUT tables are used by the display to create "waveforms" that refresh every pixel. This of course has negative consequences - the refresh isn't perfect (but still okey) and artifacts may build-up with time. To recover the display you would need to turn off this feature and run the project for a while using original LUT tables. To see how the tables were modified issue this command: diff epd2in7b.py epd2in7b_fast_lut.py

The idea of modifying the LUT tables has been described here for 4.2" displays. Since I don't have 4.2" display I didn't try to provide similar feature for it.

To enable this feature set the following environment variable: export EPAPER_FAST_REFRESH=true

• rework drawing.py (make it a class and gagues rendered w/o knowledge about their final placement)

Since this project is a fork, the original licenses still apply. The modifications and enhancements are being done under Apache 2 license.

• Piotr Skowronek
• Original author