This project was to use an ePaper display to display weather information in my lounge room. Really it was an experiment to see what you could do with ePaper, because the ePaper module was an impulse buy while looking around Waveshare's web site.
The display module is a 4.2" monochrome display. Given I wanted this to connect by WiFi, it made sense to use their ESP8266 based driver board.
After connecting up the display to the driver, I powered it on to see the test mode. That seemed to work OK so I tried some code to display the current time.
You cannot really see from the photo, but the display is very thin. Thinner than LCD.
I had thought about designing and 3D printing a case for the display, but that's a bit above my Blender/OpenSCAD skill level. There are a couple of cool cases for similar boards on Thingiverse though.
In the end I repurposed a 6x4" photo frame. I cut a mask out of paper (just as a test), and it kind of looks OK.
The final version of the code has the time and date in the top left; the weather conditions in the centre left; the network status on the bottom left; and then the indoor and outdoor temperature on the right. You can see the source code (along with details on how it gets the temperature updates) at GitHub: https://github.com/eb3nezer/mqtt_epaper
So of course now I have a photo frame with a micro-controller hanging out the back. I had a look around to see if anyone had designed a suitable case, but didn't see anything, so I ended up designing one myself.
I went through a few prototypes:
This is the final model:
The screw holes allow it to be mounted onto the stand of the photo frame:
If you are interested, the design for the case is available at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3576172
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