ESE 1110, Team 06, LiveINK

Inspiration

The lack of a sign at our college house (Hill) to tell us if we needed our PAC code or not, and the lack of dynamic information outside of Professor's doors.

What it does

LiveInk is a dynamic E-Ink display controlled by a raspberry Pi Zero W that will be connected to a Json hosted wifi server and controlled by a web application. Each device will be a thin, wall-mountable, 3D printed box with a 7.5” diagonal display, and it will have its own key specific to it. This key is how the wifi application will associate information and an image layout with each device, so that the correct display updates to the correct image in real time. We will be using a web-based application to create a widget page that can be uploaded to our server and then pulled to the RasPi on change. The device is battery powered because all of the controls and the display are very power efficient, however, it must be connected to a wifi network by the user. This is currently being worked on to simplify the user experience to simply entering their key and information on the site and creating a display profile, no difficult coding necessary.

How we built it

We used 3D printed housing, a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and eventually Zero W and a 7.5in E-Ink Display from Waveshare.

Challenges we ran into

Image scaling on the client-side, memory management on the Pi and Wi-Fi disconnect handling.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The extreme power efficiency not only of the screen but of the running pi that has been pared down to bare bones python script function as to reduce as much power usage as possible.