describes using a 13.3 inch ED133UT2 1600×1200 E-Ink display with an ITE IT8951 electronic paper display (EPD) driver, controlled by an ESP32. uses this idea to create a wall mounted newspaper packed full of features. Posted in Software Hacks, Video Hacks Tagged alien, e-ink, GaN, machine learning, very slow movie playerĮ-Ink displays are becoming more ubiquitous and with their low power draw, high contrast and hackability, we see many projects use them in framed wall art, informational readouts and newspaper displays. For example, making dithering look good in the game Return of the Obra Dinn required a custom algorithm. And as for dithering? It’s been around for ages, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t new problems to solve in that space. Here’s the original Very Slow Movie Player that so inspired, and here’s a color version that helps make every frame a work of art. Curious about the code? Here’s the GitHub repository. The results do a great job of delivering quality visuals even when there are sharp changes in scene contrast to deal with. So the overall challenge faced was twofold: how to dither a frame in a way that looked great, but also tried to minimize the number of pixels changed from the previous frame? All of a sudden, he had an interesting problem to solve and chose to solve it in an interesting way: training a GAN to generate the dithers, aiming to balance best image quality with minimal pixel change from the previous frame. Delivering good dithering results despite sudden contrast shifts, and with fewest changed pixels. A very slow movie player aims to present each frame as cleanly as possible in an artful and stylish way, so rewriting the entire screen for every frame would mean uglier transitions, and that just wouldn’t do. With these displays, changing the screen contents is where all the work happens, and it can be a visually imperfect process when it does. One consideration is the e-ink display itself. By itself, a dithering algorithm isn’t a cure-all and does an excellent job of explaining why, complete with loads of visual examples. The usual way to display images on a screen that is limited to black or white pixels is dithering, or manipulating relative densities of white and black to give the impression of a much richer image than one might otherwise expect. It shows high definition frames from Alien (1979) at a rate of about one frame every 200 seconds, but a surprising amount of work went into getting a color film intended to look good on a movie screen also look good when displayed on black & white e-ink. was so impressed and inspired by the concept of a very slow movie player (which is the playing of a movie at a slow rate on a kind of DIY photo frame) that he created his own with a high-resolution e-ink display. Posted in clock hacks, Microcontrollers Tagged battery, clock, e-ink, e-paper, ESP32, smart watch, watch The ESP32 is a capable and versatile chip, even capable of playing popular 8-bit video games, although we’re not sure this functionality would fit in a smart watch and preserve battery life at the same time. Or perhaps you could chip in and add some of the features on the whislity. With all of the code available, qpaperOS could make an excellent platform from which to build your own smart watch around. Of course, with the power of the ESP32 comes a whole host of other features including GPS, a step counter, and a weather display, although since the firmware is still under development, some of these features have yet to be implemented. With a 250 mAh battery, it should last about five days on a charge. Of course, it’s not a smart watch without some software to run on it, which is where qpaperOS comes in.ĭeveloped by, this open source firmware for the T-Wrist is designed to get the most out of the battery by updating only once per minute. One option is the ESP32-based LILYGO T-Wrist. If you’re looking to bridge the gap between a day and a year, you might look into a smart watch with an e-ink display. Modern smart watches, at least in terms of battery life, have taken a step backwards - depending on use, some can require daily charging. The world’s first quartz wristwatches were miles ahead of electric and mechanical wristwatches by most standards of the time, their accuracy was unprecedented and the batteries typically lasted somewhere on the order of a year.
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