The Final E-ink Weather Display

The Final E-ink Weather Display

Pico project number one is finally “shipped” with the addition of a badly made wooden frame to hold the thing and let me stick it to the wall, plugged into a USB power socket. Let’s face it: the frame is not it’s strong point, but just putting the raw components on the wall would look …

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A Raspberry Pico Bird Camera

A Raspberry Pico Bird Camera

Hot on the heels of, if not success, then at least lack of failure in my rather simple project to build a Raspberry Pico e-paper weather display, what I’d really like to have is a camera to photograph the very infrequent visits to the feeder in the garden. There are plenty of cameras on the …

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Pico E-ink Weather Display: Version 2 (or 2.9?)

Pico E-ink Weather Display: Version 2 (or 2.9?)

For my first Pico experiments I bought the smallest e-ink display I could, because it was the cheapest and who knows if I’d even pass the first hurdle of making a prototype. I’d also bought the wrong type, with a cable connection instead of a nice and easy Pico-compatible HAT. So I ended up with …

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Optimising RAW Images For An E-ink Display

Optimising RAW Images For An E-ink Display

Whilst building the e-ink weather display for the Pico I’ve had to make a number of RAW images. I’ve been doing this by opening PNGs in Photoshop, converting them to grayscale, changing them to Bitmap (or 1-bit images) and then, because Photoshop won’t let me save a 1-bit image as RAW, I convert them back …

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Customising The E-ink Weather Display

Customising The E-ink Weather Display

With all the pieces in place to allow me to draw to the e-ink screen, I made some 8-bit RAW images and wrote values to the display. It worked, but it looked a bit crusty, not least because the Framebuffer.text method for putting text onto the screen is a fixed size, and a fixed font. …

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Show Me The Weather

Show Me The Weather

After connecting the e-ink display to the Pico and managing to get it to display in landscape mode I felt I’d solved the unknowns in making this e-ink weather display. Now it was time to decide what I was going to show, and how I was going to show it. One Python example I’d found …

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Micropython E-ink Display Rotation

Micropython E-ink Display Rotation

By default, sending pixels from a Raspberry Pico to a Waveshare e-ink display will result in a portrait image. In the case of the 2.13inch display I started with, this means a screen of 122 pixels wide by 250 pixels high. But what if you want to display in portrait mode? As someone who’s used …

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Getting Started With The Raspberry Pi Pico

Getting Started With The Raspberry Pi Pico

The whole Raspberry Pi craze has passed me by before. Mainly because I have no competency whatsoever in electronics, and when it comes to using it just as a small computer I’ve had no need for one. I don’t really know what drew me to the Raspberry Pi Pico, but it just looked like such …

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It Lives! (Again!)

It Lives! (Again!)

After nearly 5 years of neglected I’ve revived the blog. Although the posts have been in existence over at blog.karlbunyan.com for a few years a lot of the images were broken and it was quite obviously in a state of decline. Is this a blog reawakening or a false dawn? Only time will tell.