E Ink displays and the many benefits they come with shouldn’t need any introduction. No wonder it has emerged as the preferred choice for a display among the DIY guys who love tinkering with their Raspberry Pi computers. While the E Ink displays impress with its excellent readability and low battery consumption, the Raspberry Pi computers too are incredibly easy to program and can be made to perform customized functions easily.
Unfortunately, those who aren’t too tech savvy but would like to have a device with long battery life and performs customized tasks like tracking the stock market, showing weather updates, and such can still have their say thanks to the PaperPi project by developer Aaron Ciuffo. It offers a sort of plug and play approach and will require the least amount of programming, if at all.
As Ciuffo described, PaperPi offers a series of E-Ink display plugins that are customized for specific tasks. It makes available several of the most commonly used tools so that users won’t have to build those all over again. As mentioned in a Reddit post, ProjectPi offers plugin support for the following, including some more not mentioned in the list.
- Crypto Currencies
- Weather
- Spotify – Now Playing
- Logitech Media Center – Now Playing
- Reddit Quotes
- XKCD Comics
- New Yorker Comics
- Phases of the Moon
- Various Clocks
Then there is the LibreSpot plugin as well which can integrate with Spotify, besides also pairing up the HiFiBerry HAT for audio.
Ciuffo also claimed PaperPi is tested to work optimally with Raspberry Pi 4B and 3B models, both of which run the Raspberry Pi OS Buster. Also, as Tom’s Hardware mentioned, ProjectPi is yet to be tested with Raspberry Pi Zero though it should be just a matter of time before anyone goes ahead with that. Meanwhile, Ciuffo has revealed the displays that ProjectPi is compatible with on its GitHub page.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I'll likely make a film sometime in the future.