Here is yet another instance of E Ink and ChatGPT conspiring to come up with something as innovative as it is interesting. It is the Hyepaper project conceived by Eike Hein that is being referred to here as revealed by Hackster.io. It basically is a customized newspaper that makes use of a 13.3-inch E Ink panel having 1600 × 1200 resolution with an ESP32 providing the processing backbone.
“Hyepaper an automatic newspaper in a frame, intended as a decorative piece,” said Hein who is a software engineer by profession. “It features a 13.3″ 1600×1200 E Ink panel in an ESP32-based, battery life-optimized frontend that wakes up once a day from deep sleep to fetch and update with a new newspaper image. All onboard software is written in Rust, including a custom driver for the ITE IT8951 EPD controller chip.”
The concept of showcasing newspaper front pages on e-paper displays has been explored in multiple ways over the years, with notable examples by Greg Raiz and Max Braun. However, the Hyepaper takes a new approach: it is designed to leverage OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology to condense and summarize content from numerous customizable news outlets and present those that are likely to be of interest to you.
“The backend running on the [Raspberry] Pi is written in Python,” Hein explains. “It includes lxml-based article scrapers for some websites my wife and I like, and then runs the content through OpenAI’s ChatGPT API to trim articles for size, perform light style transfer, and generate suitably short headlines for the layout. It also fetches a weather forecast from the OpenWeatherMap API, which goes into the top-right corner of the header — the layout is of course heavily inspired by the frontpage of the New York Times. With the content in hand it then generates a LuaTeX input file using the Jinja2 template library.”
The device boasts a convincing newspaper format, complete with a masthead, imagery, and a columnar layout. To ensure efficient power usage, the Hyepaper has incorporated some smart features, including a 5V relay to prevent power drains from the e-paper display driver, and a real-time clock that wakes up the ESP32 when it’s time to draw a new front page. With this technology, the Hyepaper can run on battery power for weeks at a time.
Previously, we have seen a 32-inch E Ink newspaper project designed to show newspapers downloaded from the internet. The massive display ensured it looked as close to a real newspaper as possible.
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.
