Vinky-pi

this project is still a work in progress

front image of device

This is the Inky Impression, a 7.3" E-paper display with the ability to display with 6 colors. The one problem i have is a personal pet-peeve of mine, I don't like python and don't trust the dev using it on a security aspect, but do want to make use of an E-paper display i bought.

back image of device

It can be driven by any device that has a raspberry pi 40-pin-compatible header, and I am using a pi zero 2 w

The reference project is fully written in Python and the problem I have is the python webApp part, as an interpreted language it can change at any moment without the end user knowing. It becomes a bigger problem when run as a system-d module, in other words as the root user, which is the default of the reference project. to solve this I plan to reverse engineer this program and make a new implementation in another language (probably go and c++ as they are compiled).

one of the difficulties I encountered early on was that wiringPi got deprecated by the maintainer. This is due to other SBC (single board computer) projects were using the library while the maintainer explicitly said he only wrote it for the pi.

current status of the project

  • frontend
    • finishing touches
    • adding widget configuration
  • backend
    • working on
      • updating config file from json to a toml format
      • time based interval trigger for updating the display after the specified duration
      • saving above duration/setting in a user-accessible config file
    • needs work
      • finalizing communication between driver and backend
  • driver
    • communication between driver and display
    • finalizing communication between driver and backend