Stavros decided to make a little e-ink display device that showed his outlook calendar and could sit next to his main monitor. He seemed to have a decent, basic understanding of programming, but had some clever ways of getting around things he didn’t know – namely – using CoPilot and sample code to hack together what he needed. I think it’s a great read to show how you can work through problems in a very pragmatic way – without re-inventing the wheel.

In the end, he struggled through finding a good quality e-ink display, an SDK that let him display on it consistently (running into many bad SDK’s and ones that left lots of artifacts), getting calandar graphics on the device, and 3d printing the case it was mounted in.

Most interesting to me was that instead of trying to interface with his calendar app and go through the difficult work of re-creating a properly formatted/sized and good looking calendar graphics – he came up with a much more simple and easy method. He admits he wasn’t very good at C++ programming and had some false starts trying to find a software package that let him render consistently to the display. There were many that didn’t work right, left lots of lines on the screen, etc.

He then took his C++ compiler and a block of framebuffer rendering sample code. Then, with the help of CoPilot, he stumbled through a method that simply displaying the calendar in a web browser, copy the screen, download the image file over HTTP, and copy the bytes directly onto the framebuffer.

He set up a sever-side script to generate the image along with a hash of the image so the device knew when an actual update happened to the image since he didn’t want the e-ink display constantly flashing if it didn’t have a real update for the display.

A clever bit of hackery – and demonstrates how simply things can be made if you are creative.

Article:

• https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/