An ultra-low-power, ambient e-paper dashboard system powered by an ESP32. inkOS combines the high visibility and zero-power static state of a 5.79-inch electronic ink display with a modular, dual-environment firmware design that seamlessly swaps between network-driven data tracking and localized offline operations.
DAY 3-4: HOW’S THE WEATHER DOWN THERE
(corny title i know)
After numerous attempts to connect the display to my iphone via the nimBLE library, it never ended up working and I pivoted to working on the online dashboard - which I made decent progress on. To make things worse, my display ended up breaking, with vertical glitch stripes forming due to a small chip on the side on the screen I hadn’t noticed. I spent over 3 hours trying different methods to reset the display. Finally, I got WiFi working, and implemented the weather part of my online dashboard using the openweather API. Tomorrow, I will finish the “weather” section, possibly adding icons for visualization, and start on the “spotify” section, which will implement the spotfiy API.
(i know it may seem like i didnt do much in 10 hours but the chip in the screen and outdated vendor libraries made this a pain in the ass the debug)
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DAY 2: THE FOUNDATIONS
Today, I actually wrote some “useful” code, and designed the major UI components for my offline dashboard. As you can see, it includes a bluetooth media player, pre downloaded schedule, and a continuously updating hardware status section. Tomorrow, I will add a visual status bar for the hardware, as well as work on implementing bluetooth. Follow along for day 3!
DAY 1 - THE LINE
Believe it or not, after 2 hours of scrolling through vendor libraries and another hour of debugging my 20 line file, I finally printed a line on the screen (yes i might be a genius). Before that, I spent quite some time setting things up and importing libraries, and I ended up using the platformio IDE in vscode because I couldn’t stand the Arduino IDE. Anyways, I’m going to sleep now, proud of how far I’ve come!
