Family Calendar with Raspberry-Pi 4 and a E-Reader Display (Part 1)

In 2020 I got a Raspberry Pi 3 and after several months of experiencing with it I found a permanent project — taking daily pictures of the sky and creating a mosaic. With that project up and running, I decided to buy a Raspberry Pi 4 for my next venture.

Fast forward three years… the Raspberry Pi 4 ended up forgotten in a drawer. After multiple attempts to locate it (and even accusing my significant other of throwing it out), I finally found it! To my surprise, it was already set up, including Wi-Fi configuration. All I had to do was plug it in, and it was ready to go.

The trigger for all of this was the constant struggle for me to know what family activities and appointments we have during the week and weekends. My wife does send me invites to the mail box, but I miserably fail to check on them as I do not use often goggle calendar. Granted it would be easier to solve this, but i decided to take the long road and embark on a project that makes use of the Raspberry Pi 4 and a E-Reader display to have a Calendar on display in our living room.

I have seen many other attempts to do this and I decided to not re-invent the wheel, but to experiment with some of those and then pick one for me, on top of which I could make the customizations I require.

Inspiration

• https://github.com/speedyg0nz/MagInkCal
• https://reindernijhoff.net/2023/10/e-ink-family-calendar-a-raspberry-pi-project/
• https://github.com/aceinnolab/Inkycal
• https://github.com/speedyg0nz/MagInkDash
• https://hyogo.dev/en/works/epd

Project

At this moment I still don’t know which source code to use, I will possibly experiment some of the above options and decide which one fits better. Main goal is to have a nice calendar display, maybe with weather information and some extras as well.

If the main idea is to have the display in a frame, then having a Raspberry Pi 4 is not really the best way to go, so I guess, all going well, I will get a Pi Zero which is more portable and can easily run on battery.

E-Reader Display

This display seemed to be the larger one I could find, ideal for this project. I believe there are some others out there, but i did not spend too much time researching other options.

https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/7.5inch_e-Paper_HAT_Manual#Working_With_Raspberry_Pi

Looks pretty slick, probably the size of my kindle, which is yet another item lost in a drawer.

Now to the hard part – the instructions are terrible. There are 2 ways of connecting the interface pins to the RPI board. In the waveshare website the info to set up the software is fine, but it lacks tremendously on the hardware part.

My first choice was to use the individual pins, but due to the lack of a proper schematic, I immediately gave up on that approach.

At the end I did find some proper info, as this site has a good schematic.

However, it was not a surprise when I noticed the color scheme on my cables did not match this schematic…probably it would not matter…

On to the next option, which is much easier. We simply connect the interface on top of the RPI pins.

NOTE: I did not press strong enough so the connection was not proper. Make sure that the connection is proper.

Raspberry Pi 4

Ok, as said before, I had everything set including the ability to ssh and to use VNC to connect from my Mac to the Pi. I used a combination of both, but started with the VNC.

Ok let’s get started, open the terminal and type.

sudo raspi-config

Choose option 3, and then SPI

Finally confirm the choice.

As in most cases, a reboot is necessary.

sudo reboot

I was using the graphical mode here with VNC. I am sure one can go about it with the terminal only, but I did not explore that option. I guess the /boot/config.txt is the place to make those changes.

The next steps are to confirm the changes are in place.

cat /boot/config.txt

validate dtparam-spi=on is there

ls /dev/spi

The above command should give you the same as in the picture.

Now, just follow the next sequence, which should be quite straightforward.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-pip
sudo apt-get install python3-pil
sudo apt-get install python3-numpy
sudo pip3 install spidev

sudo apt install python3-gpiozero

git clone https://github.com/waveshare/e-Paper.git
cd e-Paper/RaspberryPi_JetsonNano/

At this time, all going well, we can use one of the examples provided to quickly test the display.

cd python/examples/
python3 epd_7in5_V2_test.py

And there we go, a working display 🙂 I almost forgot how good the e-readers look – perfect for this type of project. A tablet would be too intrusive and bright (not to consider the associated energy required to have it 24/7)

Up until now these were the instructions and steps provided by waveshare, but it was not hard specially since I already had a running Pi.

What’s next?

In the next Part I will cover an insight on the other projects to see what they have to offer before implementing it for my own.